Holism and Normative Essentialism in Heg

144
"
Ludwig Siep
54 idem.
55 idem.
56 idem.
57 Compare Taylor, "Demokratie und Ausgrenzung," in Taylor, Wieviel Gemeinschaft
braucht die Demokratie? Aufsdtze zur politischen Philosophie, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 2001,
p. 43.
Compare L. Siep, "Toleranz und Anerkennung bei Kant und irn Deutschen
Idealismus," in Toleranz als Ordnungsprinzip? Die moderne Burgergesellschaft zwischen
Offenheit und Selbstaufgabe, eds. Ch. Enders, M. Kahlo, Paderborn, Mentis, 2007,
p. 177-193.
59 Ricoeur, Course of Recognition, chapter 3.
60 L. Siep, Anerkennung als Prinzip der praktischen Philosophie.
'' The insufficiency of recognition as a criterion for just distribution has been stated
by N. Fraser, Social Justice in the Age of Identity Politics. Redistribution, Recognition, and
Participation, The Tamer Lectures on Human Values, Volume 19, ed. Grethe Peterson,
Salt Lake City, University of Utah Press, 1998,147; and Ch. F. Zurn,"Anerkennung,
Umverteilung und Demokratie."
M. Walzer, Spheres of Justice. A Defense of Pluralism and Equality, New York, Basic
Books, 1983.
I have sketched such a scale in "Anerkennung zwischen Individuen und
Kulturen," in eds. A. Gethmann-Siefert, E. Weisser-Lohmam, Wege zur Wahrheit (Otto
Poggeler zum 80. Geburtstag), Miinchen, Fink,2009, pp. 15-31.
65
In the evaluative ("Greek") sense of the term.
" As I have done in my book Konkrete Ethik.
Chapter Six
Holism and Normative Essentialism in Hegel's
Social Ontology
Heikki Ikaheimo
Introduction
"If you say that collective intentionality

is primitive, then it seems you are in a
very bad company. It seems you are
postulating some kind of Hegelian Weltgeist that is floating around overhead, or
something like that."'
Hegel is rarely mentioned in contemporary

English-language social ontology, and when
he is, then mostly in jokes or hand-waves
towards something one should in any case
avoid if one is to do serious philosophical
work. A repertoire of standard jokes is part
of the tradition of 'received views' to which
new student generations are socialised in
philosophy departments, and which forms
the sea of default prejudices upon which the
inquisitive mind sails. In Hegel's case, jokes
and caricatures about his philosophy have
tended to linger on as received views, and
reproduce themselves, even in the pages of
textbooks, long after their reasonable use by
date. Certainly, it would be surprising if this
146
Heikki Ikheirno
would have been helpful in spreading knowledge and learning about what
Hegel actually wrote.
As a consequence, although in Hegel-scholarship and philosophy explicitly
drawing on Hegel's texts most caricatures and simplifications about Hegel's
philosophy have long since been exorcised: it is still a task to be accomplished
ever anew to convince colleagues less acquainted with Hegel's work that it
contains insights and innovations that are at least worth a serious study, and
some of which might even turn out to be useful, for instance in social
ontology.
Holtsrn and Normative Essentlalisrn In Hegel's Soclal Ontology 147
recognition-and proposing how they are related. The rest of the paper will
then concentrate on the most concrete one of these principles-interpersonal
recognition-by discussing what it does according to Hegel (V), what it is not
(VI), and what exactly it is (VII). In the last section (VIII) we shall retuna to
perhaps the most controversial element of Hegel's social ontology-the idea
that the essential structures constitutive of human sociality have a tendency
towards self-actualisation.
I will conclude with a few notes about how one social theorist strongly influenced by Hegel, Marx, used some of the basic innovations of Hegel's social
ontology, albeit in a rather one-sided way, and without agreeing with him on
details of ideal institutional design. The possibility for such creative utilisations of Hegel's insights and innovations, whatever the details, are what constitutes the lasting relevance of his social ontology.
What is the object of social ontology? A relatively uncontroversial answer to

this question would seem go along the lines of "the social world, in the sense
of the world of those entities, facts, features, relations, processes etc. that are
socially constituted. But what about what it is that does the constituting?
Assuming that 'constituting' in the relevant sense is or involves some form of
activity by suitable kinds of subjects, it would seems quite relevant for social
ontology to be interested in such subjects as well.3The only kinds of subjects
we "know of that constitute social worlds are relatively complex animals,
among which-a particular kind stands out: us humans. Even if sociality
broadly understood is not an exclusively human phenomenon and even if
non-human social worlds are therefore a legitimate object of social ontology,
no other animals constitute social worlds that come close to even the most
primitive known human societies in term of complexity and depth of social
constitution. In terms of what we mean by 'sociality', the paradigmatic
general object of social ontology would certainly seem to be the human
life-form.
I. A Hegelian solution to a contemporary problem in social

ontology?
This requires making a short excursion to the question whether normative

essentialism of roughly Aristotelian kind that Hegel subscribes to is an option
that can be taken seriously in social ontology at all (111).I argue that at least in
certain issues relevant to social ontology normative essentialism is both common sense and impossible for social ontology respectably not to take seriously. This, however, does not do away with the radicality of Hegel's
normative essentialism, and the rest of the article consists of a rational reconstruction of this feature of his social ontology, together with its holism.
Talking of individual members of this life-form, human persons that is, not
only are they the paradigmatic constitutors of social worlds, they themselves
In this article, we shall put aside the jokes and take a look at some of the central ingredients in what Hegel's own social ontology, as it is presented in his
mature work, is actually made of. I proceed as follows. I will first (I) draw
attention to a lacuna in contemporary Anglophone social ontology, where
Hegel's work holds promise for remedy: the almost complete lack of theorising about the social constitution of human persons and its intertwinement
with the constitution of the rest of the social and institutional world. What I
call Hegel's holism is exactly his attempt to grasp the constitution of persons
and the constitution of the rest of the social and institutional world as an
interconnected whole. Secondly (11), as a preparation for taking a look at what
Hegel actually writes, I will take up three sources of complexity that a reader
of the central texts of his mature social ontology-The Philosophies of
Subjective and Objective Spirit-is inevitably faced with. I shall also hint at
prospects that these open for philosophical work that utilises Hegel's basic
innovations without agreeing with him on details of ideal institutional design.
The third of these sources of complexity is Hegel's normative essentialism.
This will be done by first (IV)thematising three basic principles of Hegel's

social ontology-oncrete
freedom, self-consciousness, and interpersonal
148
Heikki Ikiiheimo
are in many ways the paradigmatic socially constituted entities. Among all
.partly or wholly socially constituted entities that we can single out in human
social worlds, human persons are surely the ones in whose constitution sociality plays the most multifarious and complex role." In thus not only being the
subject or agent of social constitution but also its central object or result, the
human person would seem to have a rightfulplace as the paradigmatic single
object of social ontology.
And yet the fact is that persons and their social constitutionhave received very
little attention in contemporary international-which means Anglophonesocial ontology, and practically none by some of its most celebrated philosopher-pra~ticians.~
On the contrary, a typical move in the contemporary
landscape of philosophical social ontology is to take more or less full-fledged
persons as given and discuss the rest of social reality as constituted by them.
This, it seems, leaves only two options:
Either persons are thought of as not part of the social and institutional world at all,
but related to it only externally,
or, alternatively, it is admitted that persons are indeed part of the social and institutional world in the sense of being (partly or wholly) socially constituted themselves,
ments of the social and institutional world that can be conceived of as constituted
but the task-description of social ontology is limited to only those aspects or eleby already full-fledged persons.
Following the first option, persons are hence thought of as external to the
world that is the object of social ontology, and therefore quite unlike the kinds
of creatures we know we are: social beings not merely in the sense of subjects,
but also in the sense of objects of social constitution.The second option avoids
this awkward predicament, yet it produces another. That is, if it is admitted
that persons themselves are partly or wholly socially constituted entities, but
decided that social ontology only arrives on the scene when fully constituted
persons are already given, then it is accepted that social ontology does not
address the most fundamental levels or processes of social constitution at all.
Even if many social phenomena--such as carrying furniture upstairs or going
for a walk together, founding clubs, acting as the executiveboard of a business
corporation, and so forth (to borrow typical examples from the literature)actually can be accounted for by presupposing more or less full-fledged
persons as given, the ones that can are surely not the ontologically most
Holism and Normative Essentialism in Hegel's Social Ontology 149
foundational ones6To the extent that social ontology resorts to such a drastic
shrinking down of its task-description, it also remains of relatively limited
use to anthropology, social sciences, pedagogy, and other disciplines where
the social constitution of persons is an unavoidable topic.
To seriously thematise the very foundations of the social and institutional

world, it would thus seem necessary to focus on social processes and structures that are constitutive of human persons themselves. One way to do this,
one might suggest, would be by way of the opposite stage-setting: explicating
the constitution of persons by assuming the (rest of the) social and institutional world as given. Yet, to use a familiar metaphor, this would be merely
replacing the ontological egg with the ontological chicken. Assuming that in a
philosophical account of the human life-form that intends to get at the bottom of its social constitution it is as illegitimate to assume as given a society
devoid of persons, as it is to assume as given persons independently of society, it seems that the only remaining strategy is to account for the constitution
of persons and the rest of the social world together.
Why Hegel?
So what, if anything, does Hegel have to offer to the serious minds of busy
people working in the field of social ontology? Perhaps most importantly, his
philosophy involves a sustained attempt at systematically conceiving the
constitution of human persons and the constitution of the rest of the social
and institutional world as internally interconnected. The catchword here is,
perhaps prima facie notoriously, 'Geist', or 'spirit' as it is mostly translated in
English? However, rather than thinking of 'spirit' as a name for an ethereal
entity floating around or above human societies, or a cosmic principle steering the actions of humans behind their backs, as is still often done, a scrutiny
of what Hegel actually writes in the part of his mature system titled
'Philosophy of Spirit' has the best chance to start on the right foot when one
thinks of 'spirit' as nothing more than a 'headline' or 'title-word'-to borrow
Pirrnin Stekeler-Weithofer's simple but in my view very insightful suggestion-for the human life-form?
More precisely, 'spirit' is best thought of as a title-word for three closely interrelated themes: first, for everything that distinguishes humans as persons
150
Heikki Ik3heimo
from simpler animals: secondly for everythmg that distinguishes the social
and institutional structures of human life-worlds from simpler animal
environments and forms of interaction, and thirdly the collective human
practices of reflecting on the human form of life and its position in the whole
of what there is, namely art, religion and philosophy itself.I0 It is these three
interrelated topics that are explicitly at issue in the three main parts of Hegel's
Philosophy of Spirit-Philosophy of SubjectiveSpirit, Philosophy of Objective
Spirit and Philosophy of Absolute Spirit-respectively.
Understanding 'spirit' as a mere title-word has the simple virtue of avoiding
a burdening of one's encounter with Hegel's text, from the start, with the
back-breaking ballast of obscure associations and received views that it has
been burdened with since Hegel's death. Whether a serious study will eventually lead one to affirm some such view of Hegel or not, it is a sound methodological rule that one should initially assume 'spirit' to mean exactly what
is in fact discussed in Hegel's Philosophy of Spirit. And that, as said, is the
human person, the human society (and its history), and the human reflectionforms of art, religion and philosophy.ll
Saying that 'spirit' is a title-word for these topics is not saying that it names a
mere collection of this and that having to do with, or belonging to, the human
life-form. On Hegel's account, the distinction between subjective and objective spirit, or personhood and social and institutional structures, is "not to be
regarded as a rigid one,"12 but these are rather to be seen as aspecb or
moments of a closely interconnected whole, and the same is true of absolute
spirit, or the self-reflective activities that human persons collectively engage
in. Not only are these issues interrelated in all the myriad of ways that we
know they are. Hegel also claims that there are certain overarching principles
governing them together. In what follows, we shall start working our way
towards them by clarifying first some of the complexities that a reader of
Hegel is faced with.
II. Some complexities of reading Hegel, and prospects they open

for a critical utilisation of his thoughts
There is unfortunately no denying the fact that Hegel is not an easy philosopher to read, and that there are plenty of reasons why even the most skilled
Holism and Normative Essentialism in Hegel's Social Ontology 15 1
readers of Hegel have to struggle to discern what exactly the basic principles
of his text are and how exactly they play out in his discussion of particular
themes. These are reasons to do with the structure of his system, his methodology, and his manner of expression. For our purposes it suffices to point out
three sources of complexity.
Different levels of conceptualisation and the relation between them
First, there is an inbuilt 'necessary contingency' involved in the interplay of

concepts and considerations with different levels of abstraction in Hegel's
philosophical system. Even if each higher level of conceptuality provides
structuring principles for each lower level, each descending step in levels of
abstraction introduces a new layer of contingency untamed by the governing,
higher or more abstract concepts and principles. This is clearly true of
how the pure concepts or categories that are at issue in the first part of his
three-partite system, the Logic, apply to the spatiotemporal world of real
phenomena at issue in the two 'Real-philosophical' parts of the system, the
Philosophy of Nature and the Philosophy of Spirit that
Even if Hegel is a
conceptual realist in that in his view the basic categorical structure discussed
in the Logic is "out there," not merely in subjective minds (and Hegel does
not postulate a transcendental mind or subject in singular), this does not
mean that the details of the world can be simply deduced from the logic.'*
Yet, the pure concepts or categories are structures of reality and they are at
play in Hegel's description of the various realms of what there is. The same is
true of how Hegel applies less abstract, that is, not purely logical, philosophical concepts or principles to particular object-realms: the higher levels provide structuring principles for, yet do not reduce the complexity and
contingency of, the lower levels.
The problem for the reader is that it is often extremely difficult to discern how
exactly the pure concepts mingle with the less abstract 'Real-philosophical'
concepts, or, going down in levels of abstraction, with scientific and everyday
concepts, in Hegel's structuraldescriptions of this or that particular region of
nature or spirit. This difficultyis well known among readers of the Philosophy
of Right, which is, in principle, an extended version of the Philosophy of
Objective Spirit.15Yet, it is as much true of all the other parts of his Realphilosophy.
152
Heikki Ik2heimo
It is a consequence of the fact that structures of reality, as Hegel conceives of

them, cannot be simply deduced from higher structures or principles, or that
these principles cannot be applied to reality in any mechanical way that
Hegel's structural descriptions of the different realms and phenomena of
nature and spirit are, by their nature, painstaking handiwork in trying to conceptualise each phenomena in ways that seem to get them right or do justice
to them, all things considered. Since Hegel is far from explicit about the exact
manner in which he utilises concepts and principles of different levels of
abstraction in his often extremely intricate conceptualisations of this or that
particular realm or structure of reality, following his thought requires painstaking effortfrom the reader as well.
Interestingly for those who are interested in utilising Hegel for contemporary
philosophical purposes, the 'necessary contingency', or necessary degree of
indeterminacy in the application of higher level structures at lower levels also
means that it should be possible, by Hegel's own standards, to come up with
descriptions that differ somewhat from his own by utilising his own higher
order conceptual principles. This is so due to the fact that the more concrete
level of concepts is in question, the more description is dependent on perspectivity and situationality.Even if Hegel did think that at the highly abstract
level of the Logic pure thinking free of situationalityis a meaningful ideal, he
never thought this to be possible at the level of everyday concepts, nor even
at the level of most scientific concepts, where interest, situation and perspective are necessary elements of anything deserving the name of knowledge.16
In other words, one should not let the details of Hegel's own concrete levels
of conceptualisation get in the way of reconstruction, or creative utilisation of
his higher level principles.
Concentration of meaning and changing focus
The second source of difficulty for any reading of Hegel's work is the enormous breadth of his philosophical concerns, together with the in comparison
extreme brevity of the body of text that comprises his mature philosophical
system. These factors together result in a level of concentration of meaning
that may be matched by no other body of texts in Western philosophy. One
aspect of this is that Hegel usually has many different goals in mind in writing any given passage included in his system.17
Furthermore, and this is most relevant for our theme, even if in principle everything in the system is somehow related to everything else, the different
Real-philosophical parts of the system actually sometimes focus on partly
unrelated concerns, and proceed on partly different levels of abstraction. That
is to say that Hegel may have a certain set of issues in mind in a particular
part of the system, but then drop some of the issues and take up new ones in
a related part of the system-even though each of the issues should be discussed in both parts were they to be clarified systematically.
Importantly for us, this is in fact the case with the two most directly relevant
parts of Hegel's system for social ontology, the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit
and the Philosophy of Objective Spirit: Even if they are elements of an interconnected whole, it is difficult to grasp exactly this interconnection due to
differences in focus and level of abstraction between these two parts. What I
mean is that Hegel's interest and focus in Philosophy of Objective Spirit is on
a significantly more concrete level of issues and considerations and thereby
proceeds at a more concrete level of conceptualisation than is the case with
Philosophy of Subjective Spirit. Part of what 'more concrete' means is 'more
bound to Hegel's own particular time and place'. Whereas Hegel's structural
description of the human person in Subjective Spirit contains relatively few
claims that are at least obviously only reasonable about human being in a particular cultural and historical situation but not in others, his structural description of the social and institutional whole that he calls the state and describes
in Objective Spirit contains a great number of details that are best described
as Hegel's "own time [and place] comprehended in thought^".'^
Not mere description, but ideal description
But there is a further complication. Namely, what is at issue is not merely to

what extent Hegel's structuraldescription of the human person or of the social
and institutional world accurately describe existing human beings or societies in a simple observational sense. (Even if in this sense too it does
seem quite obvious that the former is much more readily universalisable.)This
is so because these descriptions are, as a rule, geared towards an ideal mode of
existence of the phenomena in question. Thus, empirical humans or societies
only conform to the descriptions to the extent that they conform to the ideal.
On the other hand, Hegel means the ideals not to be external to the
154
Heikki IEheirno
phenomena, but immanent to each phenomenon as their essence or essential

structure.
This is what is at stake in Hegel's famous "Doppelsatz" in the Philosophy of
Right, according to which "what is actual is rational, and what is rational is
actual".IgPut very briefly, the point is, first, that everything has a conceptual
structure, and secondly, that it is possible for anythmg to actualise its own
conceptual structure more or less. The degree of something's being "actual"
(wirklich)is the degree of its actualising its own conceptual structure and thus
the degree of its being "rational" (verniinftig).
There is more to unpack in the Doppelsatz (we have only unpacked the first of
its two sub-sentences), but the important point for us is that Hegel clearly
subscribes to some form of Aristotelian normative essentialism according to
which things can correspond to their essence or essential structure in different degrees and according to which the essence is somehow an immanent
ideal in them. That is to say that both Hegel's description of the human person, and his description of the social and institutional structures of the
state are 'idealising' or 'essential' descriptions and thus the question of
their generalisability does not merely concern the question whether or to
what extent all human beings or all states accurately correspond to the
description (or rather the other way around), but rather how steady a foothold there is to argue that the descriptions describe ideals that are somehow
immanent in humans in general, or societies in general, as their essential
structure.
There is a marked difference between the first and the second case, so that
chances to pull the argument through seem better in the first case than in the
second. This is for the reason already mentioned-namely that Hegel's ideal
description of the essential structures of human personhood in Subjective
Spirit remain at a significantly more abstract level than his ideal description
of the essential social and institutional structures of human society or 'the
state' in Objective Spirit. This means that one may end up in endorsing (with
some set of good reasons) Hegel's ideal of human personhood, without being
able to endorse (with good reasons) the details of his institutional design.
Importantly, this is compatible with subscribing to Hegel's general project of
conceiving personhood and social structures as constitutively intertwined,
since this project may still make good sense when one abstracts from
Holism and Normative Essentialism in Hegel's Social Ontologj 155
(whatever one thinks are) the questionable details of Philosophy of Objective

Spirit, and stays at the higher level of abstraction on which Philosophy of
Subjective Spirit proceeds-and does this in reading both the Subjective and
the Objective Spirit.20
But what about the philosophical credibility of conceiving essences or essential

structures as immanent ideals for beings whose structures they are? Can such
an idea be taken seriously today? And is it of any relevance to social
ontology?
Ill. Hegel's normative essentialism--sound common sense about

something
Whereas the attempt at systematically conceiving the constitution of human

persons and the constitution of the rest of the social and institutional world as
internally interconnected-let us call this Hegel's h~lism~~--sounds
like
something that recommends Hegel's work for serious attention, normative
essentialism has a ring to it that is not likely to win friends in many comers of
the philosophical world today." To see clearly what is at stake here, and thus
to be able to make a balanced judgment about Hegel's position, two issues
need to be clarified: first, what is 'essentialism' in general, and secondly, what
is 'normative essentialism' in particular?
So what is essentialism? Let us agree that on the most liberal formulation

essentialism is the view according to which it is possible, and, on a less liberal
version, actually the case that some features of a thing are 'essential' to it, or
(synonymously)that it 'has them essentially'. Let us call these two versions of
essentialismthe 'potentialist' and the 'actualist' version respectively. It is, further, possible to be a global potentialist or actualist essentialist and hence to
claim that it is true of all things that some of their features either may be, or
actually are essential to them. Alternatively, one may be a local potentialist or
actualist essentialist and hence claim that it is true of some things that they
either may have or actually have some of their features essentially. The same
distinctions apply to anti-essentialism."
In social ontology, essentialism is, as such, a perfectly normal position to take.

To start with, to the extent that social ontology has as its primary general
156
Heikki lk&eirno
object the human life-form in general, and thus not merely these or those particular people or societies, it is a universalising enterprise.And since it is not
an empirical enterprise in any simple observational sense, but ontology, its
generalisations are not merely empirical generalisations focused on actually,
yet contingently, universal features of humans or human societies. What social
ontology tries to grasp are essential and thus necessarily universal features or
structures of the human life-form, or to borrow again John Searle again, "the
structure of human ~ivilization".~~
If one is to do social ontology in this sense
at all, one cannot help being an essentialist about something at least, namely
the human life-form-and not only in the 'potentialist' sense of accepting that
it is possible that some features or structures are essential to the human lifeform, but also in the committed 'actualist' sense of proposing some particular
features or structures as actually essential to it. That Hegel is an essentialist
on the human life-form in these senses therefore in no way distinguishes him
from the contemporary mainstream of social ontology exemplified by, say,
John Searle.
But what about the fact that Hegel's essentialism is of an Aristotelian, normative variant? What is normative essentialism? Let us agree that normative
essentialism is essentialism on the above definition (so that the distinctions
between the potentialist and actualist senses of essentialism, as well as
between global and local essentialism apply to it), but with two added elements: that it is possible for a thing to instantiate the features or structures
essential to it in differentdegrees, and that the more it does the better, in some
sense relevant sense of goodness. Let us add to these a third element which is
as much a feature of Hegel's version of normative essentialism as it is of
Aristotle's: essences have some kind of tendency towards act~alisation.~~
There is a strong tendency, shared across very different philosophical schools,
towards judging such a view out of hand as a mere metaphysical museum
piece that no-one (after Newton, Kant, Darwin, Wittgenstein, Foucault, or
whoever one's favourite hero of anti-essentialism is) should take seriously.
Yet, such a sweeping judgment involves an element of self-deception, since in
fact we do take actualist normative essentialism perfectly seriously in some
issues, and it is arguably very difficult not to do so. Indeed, normative essentialism is part of common sense-that is, of the kind of default-thinking that
is at work in structuring actual human practices-about certain very
important elements of the human life-form, elements that are in various ways
involved in practically everything that humans do. I mean usable artefacts.
Think of, say, ~hairs.2~

It makes perfectly good sense to ask what is the essence
of a chair, or in more colloquial terms, what is it that makes something a chair.
A rather workable general answer would seem to be something like 'sittability'. Sittability, it seems, is an example of essence in the normative sense,
meaning that the more or better a chair instantiates this general functional
(and clearly relational, since chairs should fit human backsides) property--Or
to use another term, practical significance--that makes it a chair in the first
place, the better a chair it is.
When something exemplifies this feature or significance to a very high degree,

it inspires essentialist judgments in satisfied sitters of the kind "now this is
what I call a chair". At the other end of the scale, something's being absolutely horrible to sit on means that it is Likely not to be taken as a chair at all,
but either as an object with some other function or then just junk. Of course
what exactly are the more precise features that comprise the general essential
feature of sittability, or in other words what are the more precise features that
makes a chair good to sit (for an average human backside), is a matter of further debate, but people designing chairs are expected to have a good enough
answer.
Indeed, it belongs to the essence of chair designers that they are actualist
essentialists on chairs: to stay in the business of chair-designing and thus to
be a chair-designer one not only needs to have a good enough idea of the
more exact constituents of sittability,but also to accept sittability as an essential feature of chairs, and not just as an accidental feature of them such as, say,
colour." This, of course, assumes that chair-consumerstoo are essentialists on
the sittability of chairs, which is Likely for obvious reasons: sit on really bad
In short, it is
chairs long enough and you will become unable to sit at
normatively essential to chairs that they are good to sit 011.2~
Hence, chairs easily fit the first two bills that make Hegel's essentialism normative: they can instantiate the features, structures or significances that are
essential to them in different degrees, and the more they do the better-in a
functional or instrumental sense of goodness. As to the third element of
Hegel's normative essentialism-self-actualisation-focusing
merely on the
158
Heikki lkiiheimo
practice of sitting (and thus abstracting from intervening factors such as, say,
the practice of capitalist economy), there clearly is a tendency towards chairs
exemplifying their general essential feature of sittability well and thus being
good chairs. This tendency is immanent to chairs in the sense that it is irnmanent to the practice where chairs are constituted as chairs:30between sitting
on better or worse chairs, people tend to choose the better ones if they can. To
say that we should not be talking about self-actualisation of the essence of
chairs because it is actually a social practice that does the actualising is to
miss the point that this social practice is not external to chairs, but constitutive of their being chairs in the first pla~e.3~
All of this, it seems, is not only true of chairs, but of usable artefacts in general. Three points can be made here. First, actualist normative essentialism
about chairs and other usable artefacts is common sense. Secondly, it is common sense in the practical sense of being at work in, and indeed constitutive
of, the practices in which usable artefacts are what they are. Thirdly, it therefore would make little sense to suggest that although common sense may be
normatively essentialist on chairs, in fact it is wrong to be so; or to suggest
that common sense only grasps how this area of social reality "appears," but
not how it is "in itself". How common sense takes or regards usable artefacts
in social practices is constitutive of how they really are as entities of the social
~ o r l d . This
3 ~ is to say that common sense is not merely 'in the heads' of people but also 'out there' structuring the social and institutional world--or in
Hegel's terms, not merely 'subjective' but also 'objective spirit'.
As to the philosophical discourse of social ontology, given that social ontology is interested in the structure and constitutingprocesses of the social world
(and not, say, in the atom-structure of physical objects), and assuming that
normative essentalism itself is an essential feature of the attitudes and practices that make usable objects such objects, and thus of these objects themselves, it follows that social ontology must accept normative essentialism
itself as an ontologically accurate view of this part of our life-world. Common
sense normative essentialism is true about usable artefacts because it is constitutive of them.
All in all, normative essentialism of the Aristotelian-Hegelian variant is thus
both common sense and ontologically true of at least something very important to the human life-form. Hence the fact that Hegel is a normative
essentialist on the human life-form is at least not as obviously damning of

him as sweeping-and in their sweepingness self-deceptive-rejections of
normative essentialism would suggest. However, merely pointing out that
normative essentialism is common sense about something of central importance to the human life-form, namely usable artefacts, does not alone do away
with the radicality of Hegel's normative essentialism. His claim is namely
that actualist normative essentialism is not merely true of particular elements
of human life-worlds, such as chairs or other usable artefacts, but somehow
of 'spirit' in singular--or in other words, of the human lifeform as a whole. To be
absolutely clear about what this means, let us unfold it in terms of the four
claims which we have agreed that normative essentialism consists of:
a) On Hegel's view some features or structures of the human life-form are essential to it,
b) these essential features of the human life-form can be actualised in different
degrees,
c) the more they are adualised the better, in some relevant sense (or senses) of
goodness, and
d) they have an immanent tendency towards actuali~ation.~
What could Hegel possibly have in mind in promoting such an idea? In what
follows, we shall try to make sense of this in terms of how Hegel conceptualises the human life-form in his Philosophy of Spirit.
IV. Basic principles of Hegel's social ontology
So far I have pointed out two general features of Hegel's social ontology. First,
it is holistic in that it involves an attempt at conceiving the constitution of
human persons and the constitution of the rest of the social and institutional
world as internally interconnected, or in other words at conceiving human
persons and their life-world as mutually constitutive. Secondly, it involves a
commitment to a normative and teleological kind of essentialism about the
human life-form taken as a whole. Let us now to take a look at how these features play out in Hegel's social ontology by clarifying its basic principles.
When one asks for the basic principles of Hegel's social ontology, any answer
will be selective since basically every single logical concept and principle
160
Heikki Ikiiheimo
developed in the logic is somehow at play in Hegel's structural descriptions of

the different regions of what there is, even though some are more important
than others in particular regions. This also means that the interpreter can
make different selections among the logical, real-philosophical and other
principles at play in Hegel's text, which will illuminate the whole somewhat
differently. To the extent that Hegel's overall conception is coherent, these
need not be mutually exclusive.
In what follows, I will mention three closely interrelated principles that are
undeniably central for Hegel's social ontology and therefore deserve to be
called basic principle^.^^ Each of them is a principle of different level of
abstraction (or concreteness) so that presented in a descending order of
abstraction (or ascending order of concreteness) the second principle is an
instantiation of the first, and the third is an instantiation of the second (and
thereby also the first). Both the second and the third principle introduce elements that are not determined by the higher levels (remember the 'necessary
contingency1-point).Yet, on a plausible interpretive hypothesis the more
abstract principles function as 'essences' of the more concrete ones in the
sense of providing a norm or ideal for them. As will be seen, this hypothesis
can be rather easily verified in the application of the first principle to the second, whereas in the application of the second principle to the third things get
slightly more complicated.
'negations', the first of which consists of the fact that the one relatum is not
the other relatum. Yet as relata both are determined by each other. This determination by otherness is overcome by a second negation, which is the negation of the alienness or inimicality of the relata to each other. 'Absolute
negation' means just this structure involving a first negation, and a second
negation, as it were negating the first negation. As such, no temporal succession is meant; yet it is possible that one of the two negations of the absolute
negation temporally precedes the other. To the extent that this is the case, the
structure of absolute negation is (yet) deficiently unfolded.35
Without concretisation this is of course abstract to the extreme, but some hint
of its usefulness derive from the fad that Hegel, as said, often calls it simply
'freedom'. Generally speaking, what is meant by freedom here is notfreedom
from something, butfreedom with something. Hegel never tires emphasising that
freedom from something, or "abstract freedom," is a self-undermining illusion in that attempts to realise it cannot escape from some form of dependence on, or determination by, that from which the attempt to be free is made.
For Hegel, real or "concrete freedom" is not the impossibility of freedom from
factors that necessarily determine one, but some form of reconciliation or
state of mutual affirmation with them.36Concrete freedom thus has the formal structure of 'absolute negation'. What this means more concretely, will
only become clear at the more concrete levels of discussion.
The principle of absolute negation applies in Hegel's view to many things

and structures of both nature37and spirit. As to the realm of spirit which is the
home ground of freedom, it does not merely apply where issues of freedom
are usually discussed, namely in the practical dimension of actions, opportunities for action, motivations and so on, but more generally in the realm of
intentionality in general. Here intentionality is the central added element of
concreteness, which is in no way deducible from any logical principles, but is
a given phenomenon of the spatio-temporal world that has to be conceptualised adequately as such.
The principles can be called
It is best said immediately that one should not put too much weight on the
names of the principles, especially in the first two cases, but rather (again)
understand them as title-words for something that could be called with other
names as well.
(2) Thereby we come to the second principle. Hegel himself does not use the
word 'intentionality', but calls the phenomenon or structure in question consciousness (Bewusstsein).Consciousness, which is Hegel's general topic in the
second part of Philosophy of Subjective Spirit titled 'Phenomenology', is a
structure involving a subject and an object, where both relata can only be
(3) the principle of interpersonal recognition.
(2) the principle of self-consciousness,or of consciousness of oneselfin otherness
(1) the principle of absolute negation, or of being with oneselfin otherness,
(1) As to the first principle, it could also be called-as Hegel himself often
does-simplyfreedom. What is at stake is a structure involving two (or more)
relata that are defined as what they are through each other, and are thus
determined by each other without being alien or inimical to each other.
Each relatum is thus 'with itself in the other'. Such a structure involves two
162
Heiki Ibheimo
what they are in virtue of each other. It is a structure defining what Hegel
calls the "I" ( I c ~ )The
. ~ I,~ just as its pre-intentional predecessor 'self' (Selbst)
that Hegel discusses in the Anthropology, is not a separate entity, but a
structural feature of the being of concrete flesh and blood subjects. There are
two basic modifications of consciousness or 'conscious-being' (Bewussf-Sein):
the theoretical and the practical, or in other words the epistemic and the volitional. Hegel discusses the first of these in a chapter titled 'Consciousness as
such', and the second in a chapter titled 'Self-consciousness', both within
'Phenornenol~gy'.~~
These particular titles should be given particularly little systematic importance as titles of the chapters in question since they are rather misleading
in giving the impression that what Hegel means by 'self-consciousness'only
relates to the practical dimension of intentionality. There is also another
source of confusion, namely the fact that what Hegel actually means by 'selfconsciousness'-that is, in philosophical usage and not merely as the title
of a chapter-is something quite different from how this term is usually
understood in philosophy. Even if the usual sense of this term--some sort of
second order consciousness or awareness of one's own mental states-is not
irrelevant for Hegel, it is far from being its only or even paradigmatic usage
for him.4O
Ideally, self-consciousness for Hegel is being conscious of something
about oneself in an object of consciousness. This--consciousness of oneself in
objects, or put in another way conscious-being with oneself in otherness-is a
particular instantiation of the structure of being with oneself in otherness.
Hegel calls this often also 'knowing' (Wissen) or 'finding' (finden)oneself in
what is other to oneself. The structure of being, in the more concrete sense of
conscious-being, with oneself in objects is on Hegel's account an immanent
ideal or norm both for theoretical and practical object-relations.
As to the theoretical dimension, theoretical consciousness involves by its
nature a separation of objects from the subjectfor the subject or I. This is what
it means to be conscious in the theoretical or epistemic sense. To the extent
that the subject cannot grasp the objects in thought, cannot organise them or
conceive their constitution and connections, what is at hand is only the first of
the two negations of 'absolute negation'. This means that the subject is determined by an objectivity that is from its point of view alien to it. The ideal
immanent to theoretical intentionalityis, unsurprisingly,to cognise objectivity

and thereby overcome its alienness. Common sense familiarity with the world,
the sciences, and philosophy are thus the concrete practices (with different
levels of abstraction)whereby the essential structure of self-consciousnessor
conscious-being in otherness is actualised in the theoretical or epistemic
dimension. They are forms of self-consciousnessin otherness in that the subject grasps independent objects in terms of conceptual structures with which
it is familiar and with which it can operate in thought.
In other words, as the subject becomes familiar with the world and internalises its constitution in thought, it gradually finds the world instantiating
structures that are also structures of its own thinking." There is no hint of
subjective idealism in all of this since all of the structures in terms of which
subjects successfully grasp the world are really structures of the world (that
is, not merely structures of how the world appears as organised by subjectivity) and they become structures of the subject's thinking only in interaction
with the ~ o r l d . The
4 ~ tendency of self-actualisation of the essential structure
or principle is here as such nothing logical but proper to the level of concreteness at issue. It is simply whatever it is that moves humans towards a better
epistemic grasp of the world-basically the need of finite human beings to
overcome the hostility and alienness of the world that they are part of, by
understanding it.
As to the practical dimension of intentionality," practical consciousness is a

volitional relation to objects. The difference to theoretical consciousness can
be put by saying that whereas in theoretical consciousness objectivity appears
in light of what it is, in practical consciousness it appears in light of what it
ought to or should be in the subject's view. Thus, whereas the content of theoretical consciousness has what we might call an 'is-form', the content of practical consciousness has an 'ought-form'. The most primitive form of practical
consciousness is desire (Begierde) for objects that would immediately satisfy
immediately felt bodily needs-a purely animal object-relation in which
instinct points out certain objects in light of something like the significance of
'must have/bef (or 'must avoid/not be').&
Whereas the object of theoretical consciousness is at its most primitive level

(with only the absolute minimum of cognition having taken place needed to
grasp anything in the subject-object-form at all) epistemically maximally alien
164
Heikki Ikkiheimo
or specificity here is the intentional relationship with objects of a very special

kind-namely other subjects.
V. Hegelian recognition-from what it does to what i t is
In his mature system Hegel is not as explicit about the centrality of recognition in what makes humans spiritual beings.55Yet, when one looks at the
details the decisive fact remains: also in the final versions of Philosophy of
Spirit recognition is the phenomenon through which the transition (a) from
merely animal existence into a spiritual'one is made. And as I will show, the
principle of recognition is also in Hegel's mature Philosophy of Spirit a necessajr and central element in (b)the actualisation of the essential structure of
spirit, or of the essence of the life-form of human persons.
to the subject, the object of practical consciousness is at its most primitive

level a "nullity"45to the subject in the sense of maximally lacking any independence or otherness. It is reduced to, or identical with the determination
that is immediately relevant for the satisfactionof the subject's given physiological needs. In other words, whereas in theoretical consciousness there is
initially too much otherness of and too littlefinding oneselfin objects, in practical
consciousness there is initially too muchjnding oneselfin and too little otherness
of object@. For the structure of self-consciousness in otherness to be actualised
or fully unfolded in the practical dimension, the subject must view objects as
being in accordance with its volition, yet independentfrom it. Again, the logical
form or structure in question in no way provides or guarantees the urge or
drive of the actualisation of this structure.Yet, Hegel thinks that there is something in concrete human beings that provides such a drive.47
Now, Hegel is a highly systematic thinker and he thinks also of the theoretical
and the practical dimensions of intentionality or consciousness in their interrelations, as dimensions of the being of concrete flesh and blood subjects.48
Put very briefly: the theoretical and the practical dimensions of intentionality
can only take place together. Also, the actualisation of the essential structure
of intentionality must happen both in the theoretical and in the practical
dimension for it to happen at all: theoretical and practical cultivation are interrelated aspects of the actualisation of the essence of conscious-being, which is
a form of concrete freedom in the sense of being determined by otherness
with which one is 'reconciled' in the sense of both knowing it and willing it.49As
we shall see, the actualisation of this ideal of concrete freedom as reconciliation of consciousness with objectivity, both in knowing and in willing, is what
the actualisation of the essence of the human life-form, or the life-form of
human persons50amounts to in Hegel.
In the Introduction to his mature Philosophy of Spirit Hegel makes it clear

that the "essence" of spirit, as what separates humans as persons from mere
nature, isfreedom and that this means more exactly "concrete freedom". It is
the "vocation" (Bestimmung) of humanity to realise this essence of its own.56
In other words, the actualisation of features that make humans persons is the
actualisation of concrete freedom and thus to become concretely free issomehow-a vocation for them. It is clear that humans do not always heed to
this vocation and thus there is no guarantee that the essence will be actualised,
There is no doubt about the centrality of the concept of recognition for Hegel's
Philosophy of Spirit. In one of his earlier system-sketches from 1805 Hegel
puts this in simplest possible words: insofar as a human being overcomes
mere naturality and thus is 'spiritual' "he is re~ognition"~~.
And in the 1807
Phenomenology of Spirit-just before the famous depiction of the figures of the
master and the bondsman and the "struggle of recognition" between themHegel characterises spirit as "the unity o f opposite self-consciousnesses "in
their complete freedom," or as "[tlhe I that is we and the we that is I."52 This is
an instantiation of (1) the principle of absolute negation, and (2) of the more
concrete principle of self-consciousness in otherness, in the relationship of
conscious subjects to each other. Further, such a relation where subjects are
'I's (and 'thou's) by forming a 'we',% instantiaties (3) the principle or structure of (mutual) interpersonal recognition."
There is one phenomenon that is decisive for the actualisation of this essence.
What complicates matters here is that this phenomenon is on the one hand
itself a concrete instantiation of the more abstract or general principle of selfconsciousness in otherness, yet on the other hand it is not just one instantiation
among others, but in several ways essential for its being instantiated anywhere at all. This phenomenon, one which is decisive both for the overcoming
of mere animality and for the degree to which the human life-form realises its
essence is (3) interpersonal recognition. The added element of concreteness
166
Heikki Ikiiheimo
but what Hegel seems to be saying is that it is somehow built into their constitution in any case.
As we just saw, concrete freedom in the intentionality-involving mode of
self-consciousness in otherness is a complex issue since it has a theoretical
and practical dimension to it. Furthermore, different realms of objects of intentionality can be at issue. On the most general level, concrete freedom as
self-consciousness can be either a matter of intentional relationships
with nature, or then a matter of intentional relationships 'within' the realm
of spirit. It is important to understand why the latter is the genuine home
ground of concrete freedom: here the practical dimension of concrete freedom
can be actualised in ways that it cannot with regard to nature in that the subject can have its own will or volition (i) affirmed by the volition of other persons,
and (ii) instantiated in social institutions. In contrast, animal subjects cannot
affirm anyone's will in the relevant sense, nor can purely natural objects
instantiate it.57
In other words, one's practical intentionality can be reconciled with

other persons, as well as with social institutions, as independent realities,
in ways that it cannot with mere nature that neither affirms nor instantiates human volition. The two 'directions' (i) and (ii) of practical selfconsciousness in otherness within spirit, or the social world of persons, are
closely related but the first one of them-interpersonal recognition-has a certain precedence.
In order to have a clear focus on what exactly interpersonal recognition is on

Hegel's account, it is worth repeating the two important roles that it arguably
has in his Philosophy of Spirit. First, it is a central factor in the overcoming of
merely natural or animal existence, and, secondly, it is a central element in
the actualisation of the essence of the human life-form, self-consciousness in
otherness that is. With regard to recognition, the sense of goodness in which it
is true that the more the essence is actualised the better has a clearly ethical
dimension. To use terminology that is not Hegel's but gets at what is at issue
here, the degree of instantiation of recognition is the degree to which intersubjective relations are interpersonal relations.
As noted above, according to Hegel's structural description of the most primitive practical subject-object-relation that he calls 'desire' the object in it is
wholly reduced, for the subject, to its significance for the satisfaction of
immediately felt need. Or as Hegel puts it, the subject sees in the object only
"its own lack.58The primitive desiring subject has no way of accommodating in consciousness anything in the world that does not fit its solipsistic
need-driven view of things here and now. What Hegel is describing is more
or less Harry Frankfurt's "wanton,"59 only thought through to its ultimate
consequences. For it, there is no past and no future, no universals, and therefore no grasp of objects as transcending the immediate significances in light
of which they are seen at a given moment as dictated by felt physiological
needs@
. ' The practical intentionality of immediate desire leaves no breathing
space whatsoever for theoretical processes or activities of epistemically
acquainting oneself with the world more broadly? Hence, an extreme lack of
otherness of objects in the practical dimension corresponds to their extreme
otherness or alienness in the epistemic dimension with regard to anything in
them that is not immediately relevant for desire.62
How do, then, full-fledged persons, or subjects with a person-making psychological composition and structure of intentionality-the kinds of subjects
that contemporary social ontology takes for granted4ome about in Hegel's
view? His account of the overcoming of pure wantonness and the coming
about of personhood proceeds again at a level of structural description, yet
with added quasi-empirical illustration-the figures of the master and bondsman. Here it is important to understand that the decisive issue are not the
empirical or quasi-empirical details of Hegel's illustration, but rather the
principles and structural moments that they illustrate.
The essential factorin Hegel's account is that subjects overcomethe immediacy

of natural wantonness by confronting other subjects in such a way that their
structures of intentionality become mediated through each other. This is what
happens in recognition, and this explains at least part of what Hegel meant in
Jena by saying that the human being--as more than a mere wanton or animal-"is recognition". However, knowing that bringing about a mediation of
intentionalities through each other is what recognition does still leaves largely
open the question what exactly recognition is. Hegel never gave a clear definition and it is probably not unfair to say that secondary literature has not
been particularly helpful on this issue either. This general unclarity makes it
possible that wildly different candidates for an answer are often proposed
without considering their pros and cons in an explicit and organised way, or
without contrasting them with other candidates at all.
168
Heikki Ihheimo
VI. Recognition as mediation of intentionalities

Let us approach the question what exactly recognition is by first considering .
two candidates that have been proposed in the literature and that actually
suggest themselves by parts of what Hegel writes in the relevant passages.
One of these is to think of recognition as instrumentalisationof the perspective
of the other to the ends determining one's own perspective-and thereby
having one's intentionality mediated by the instrumentalised intentionality
of the other. The other candidate is to think of recognition asfear for a threatening or coercing other and thereby having one's intentionality influenced or
mediated by the threatening or coercing intentionality of the other. How do
such views suggest themselves by what Hegel writes?
On Hegel's depiction, the solipsist immediacy of the desiring intentionality is
initially disturbed or decentred by the fact that another subject actively resists
its subsumation to the determinations dictated by the first subject's immediate needs.63Such an encounter is potentially conflictual and various consequences may follow, the most extreme and structurally primitive being the
death of one party and thus the complete annihilation of the challenge that it
presented to the desire-orientation of the other. A significantly more elaborate
solution is the instrumentalisation of one subject by another to the latter's
desire-orientation by force: slavery. In Hegel's illustrative depiction of the
master and bondsman it is the death-threat that the stronger imposes on the
weaker that creates and maintains a relationship where A instrumentalises B
who fears A. The intentionality of both parties is, indeed, thereby mediated
by the intentionality of the other and thus pure solipsist wantonness seems to
be left behind.
Now, even if there is a long history of readers confusing recognition with the
relationship of the master and bondsman in Hegel, the thought is well known
and widely agreed upon in Hegel-scholarship that this relationship does not
instantiate recognition, at least not in an ideal way or in a full-fledged sense.@
But why not, exactly? One suggestion is that this is because of the radical dissymmetry or inequality of the master-bondsman-relation. This suggestion
thus invites one to think about what recognition is by removing the element
of dissymmetry or inequality from the picture. The question is then whether we
can really grasp what Hegel means by recognition by conceiving a state of
mutual instrumentalisation, or of mutual fear?'j5 Interestingly, both ways of
thinking about recognition actually appear in the literature. Since we are

faced with issues that are of decisive importance for understanding what
exactly Hegelian recognition is, it is worth considering these ways-let us call
them the instrumentalist and the phobic view of recognition-shortly one by
one.
Recognition as instrumentalisation of the other
As to the instrumentalist view, instead of charting all the different variations

it can take, I shall consider a particular version presented by Robert Brandom
in his article 'The Structure of Desire and Recognition', reprinted in this coll e c t i ~ nWhat
. ~ ~ grounds are there for saying that Brandom presents recognition as intersubjective instrumentalisation in the article? In his terms "simply
recognising" the other subject is taking it as a reliable indicator for oneself of
what is food, or otherwise desire-satisfying. Focusing on the practical dimension of this, the practical significance in light of which the other subject is
thereby seen in simple recognition is usefulnessfor finding out what one might
be able to satisfy one's desires with.'j7AS good chairs are good for sitting,
good, that is, recognition-worthy other subjects are good for being informed
about what is food (or something else of "the kind K"). Hence, on this account
recognition does indeed involve a kind of mediation of intentionality through
another intentionality in that a subject grasps another being as a subject
intending the world and adjusts its own way of intending the world accordingly. Such an idea is not mere armchair-philosophical imagination, since
something like this seems to be what higher apes actually do: they observe
other apes looking at something and will look at the same direction with
apparently the expectation of finding something of interest to themselves
there.'j8
Following Brandom's story further, the subsequent stages of recognition

("robust," "super-robust" and so on) are, from the point of view of practical
intentionality, interlocking systems of mutual intersubjective instrumentalisation. They are motivationally driven not only by simple desire, but also by
what Brandom calls the "desire for recognition". Quite radically, the
Brandomian basic level desire for recognition is, as to the practical significance that one desires to have in the eyes of others, a desire that others would see
one in instrumental lights, namely as a reliable indicator of what is food, or
172
Heikki lkheimo
what Hegel had in mind-that his idea of recognising others (as co-authorities
of social norms whereby one lives) motivationally equals to fear of them?
At first sight there are actually stronger textual reasons supporting this phobic view than there are for the instrumentalist view. Especially in the 1807
Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel puts significant emphasis on the idea that in
contrast to the master who remains motivationally closer to a merely desiring
subject, the bondsman has its motivational solipsism shaken off by the fear of
death imposed by the threatening master. Hegel's depiction is famous for its
drama:
This consciousness [of the bondsman, H.I.] has faced fear, not merely of this
or that particular thing or merely at this or that moment. Rather, its whole being has been seized with dread; for it has experienced the fear of death, the
absolute Master. In this feeling it is internally dissolved, trembled in every
fibre of its being, and all that was solid in it has been shaken loose."
It is difficult to avoid the impression that what really shakes off natural
wantonness in Hegel's view is fear, and furthermore the ultimate fear of
death, imposed by the other subject. Thus, following this particular clue one
might think that for a general overcoming of immediate desire-orientation to
take place it is necessary that all parties would feel fear for their life and
would thereby have their natural solipsism "internally dissolved" or "shaken
loose". This would mean that motivationally everyone would be in the
situation of the bondsman. And assuming that there were no external agency
of threat or coercion, and that all parties were at least largely in an equal
situation, masterdom would have to be shared as well-hence the idea of
everyone being both master and bondsman to everyone else. Rather than
being moved by simple desire, everyone would thus be moved by the
motive of self-preservation and fear, and this is what would make every one
norm-obeying subjects.
But again, this does not seem to work too well as a construal of recognition
that makes sense of what recognition does in Hegel's view. First, although the
idea of fear for one's life might be better suited for making sense of how the
kind of extreme solipsism or wantonness Hegel is after in his description of
'desire' might be overcome than Brandom's idea of instrumentalisation is,
also on the phobic account the ultimate locus of motivation still remains
purely egoistic: it is the motive of self-preservation without which there
would be nothing to fear in a death-threat in the first place. If this is all there
is to the motivational element of interpersonal recognition, then again it is
quite difficult to see recognition as being a central element of the essence of
the life-form of human persons whose actualisation is a vocation for themor in other words as an ethical ideal or principle." Analogically with the
instrumentalist view, also on the phobic view the intersubjective relation never
develops into an interpersonal relation where subjects are in each other's perspectives more than mere threats, and whereby they form a genuine 'we'.
Again, that seems hardly ideal, and thus the phobic account does not seem to
grasp adequately what Hegel was after.
VII. Recognition as personifying mediation
What is recognition then if it is to have all of the characteristics and functions

that it has for Hegel? In the final version of his Encyclopaedia Philosophy of
Spirit, Hegel describes the fully unfolded state of mutual recognition that he
calls "universal self-consciousness" as follows.
Universal self-consciousness is the afinnative knowing of oneself in another

self, where each has absolute independence, yet, in virtue of the negation of
its immediacy or desire, does not separateitself from the other. It is universal
and objective and has real universality as mutuality so that it knows itself
recognised in a free other, and knows this in so far as it recognizes the other
and knows itfree.74
In the Addition to this paragraph we can read further that this "result of the
struggle of recognition" has been drawn (herbeigefuhrt) via the "concept of
spirit". This confirms that Hegel thinks of recognition here-in the subchapter on "Universal self-consciousness," right after the sub-chapter on the
unequal relationship illustrated by the figures of the master and bondsmanin terms of what he says about the concept of spirit in the introduction to
Philosophy of Spirit.75Three interconnected issues have to be thematised first
to make sense of what exactly Hegel is after: freedom, afirmation and
significance.
174
Heikki Ikheimo
First, thefreedom of the other is here not a pre-given object to which recognition would merely be a response.76Rather, A's recognising B as free is A's making B free and only insofar as A makes B free by recognition, can B make A
free by recognition. Even if it is not impossible for A or B to have the relevant
recognitive attitudes towards B or A, only mutuality of recognitive attitudes
establishes full-blown concrete interpersonal freedom. This involves no magical acts of giving the other new causal powers; rather, the state of mutual
recognition simply is a relationship of intentionalities that instantiates concrete freedom as mutual conscious-being with oneself in one another.
Secondly,attitudes of recognition are "afirmative" of the other in ways in which
neither seeing the other in instrumental lights nor fearing the other is. Whereas
instrumentalisation involves a subsumation of the other's intentionality into
a means for one's particular pre-given ends, and whereas fear involves a subsumation of the other's intentionality as a threat within the space of sigruficance delimited by ones general pre-given end of self-preservation,recognition
in Hegel's sense involves an affirmation of the intentionality of the other in a
way in which it becomes constitutive of one's ends and thus one's practical
intentionality at large. It is due to this affirmation of B's intentionality by A
that B can "know"" itself (meaning its intentionality)in A (meaning affirmed
by A's intentionality), and vice versa. This is what Hegel means by writing
that "universal self-consciousness" as mutual recognitionis "affirmative knowing" of oneself in the other: one knows oneself affirmed by another whom
one similarly affirms. Another way in which he puts this is that subjects
"count" (gelten) for each other? which is what allows both "to realise" themselves in or through each other's consciousness.79
Thirdly, the attitudes of recognition between subjects are ways of attributing
the other, or seeing the other in light of, unique significancesthat nothing else
has in their perspectives. It is through subjects mutually attributing each
other such affirmativesignificances-in light of which they "count" to each
other in ways in which nothing else does-that the intersubjectiverelationship
instantiates concrete freedom and is an interpersonal relationship. Humans
become and are, and thus "realise" themselves, as persons by having recognitive attitudes towards each other that are affirmingof the other by viewing the
other in light of significances whereby he counts as a person for one. It is an
essential element of the 'person-making' psychological constitution of a subject
that it/she sees other subjects in light of 'person-making' significances-one

is not a person if one does not have others in view as persons." It is by recognising each other, in the sense of seeing each other in light of such affirmative
significances that subjects are 'I's (and thou's) constituting a 'we', as Hegel
put it in the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit. One cannot put too much emphasis
on this point since for Hegel this is the basic structure of the realm of spirit.
Recognition thus equals with what we could call 'personification' and hence
I call this view-which I claim to be Hegel's view-the personalist view of
recognition. It is through mutual recognition as personificationthat human subjects actualise or "realise" themselves in the sense of actualising their essence
which is personhood.
We are now in a position to start articulating in detail the core ideas of both
Hegel's holism about the constitution of persons and (the rest of) their social
and institutional world, as well as of his normative essentialism about the lifeform of human persons as a whole. Generally speaking, it is by having attitudes of recognition towards each other that subjects develop socially
mediated structures of intentionality that are both constitutive of themselves
as persons, and constitutive of the social and institutional world in general.
Therefore the phenomenon of interpersonal recognition is the core ofHegelfssocial
ontological holism. Further, the degree to which the personalising interpersonal
attitudes of recognition are effective in the overall intentionality of subjects is
the degree that their interrelations actualise the essence of the life-form-and
this is central for the essence's being actualised more generally as well.
Therefore interpersonal recognition is also the core of Hegel's normative essentialism about the human life-form.
Now, interpersonal relations of recognition have two dimensions which

Hegel does not distinguish very clearly from each other, but which need to be
distinguished in order to grasp what exactly he is talking about. The two
dimensions which I call the deontological and the axiological correspond to two
different attitudes of recognition which I call respect and love, respectively.sl
Both dimensions are present in Hegel's illustrative fable of the master and
bondsman, and even if we have to be careful not to confuse the quasiempirical details of the illustration with the structural moments that are decisive, it is probably illuminating to discuss the two dimensions partly by
reference to the fable. Let us start from the deontological dimension.
176
Heikki IkZheimo
Recognition as respect
In discussing the phobic view of recognition we already caught a glimpse of a

currently widely spread deontological discourse about spirit and freedom in
relation to recognition. For Pinkard Hegelian freedom is essentially about collective self-legislation, or co-authority, of shared social norms. Freedom is
here understood as autonomy in the sense of living under laws of one's own
authorisation and the idea is that this can only take place collectively among
subjects who recognise each other as co-authorities. The figure of the "master"
represents thus the figure of the other whose will I recognise as authoritative
on me in that I live by norms of his willing; and when everyone is recognised
as "master" by everyone else, everyone lives under collectively self-authorised norms. Subjects thus make themselves collectively free by recognising
each other as authorities. This is an important idea since it arguably is a fundamental difference between animals that are not persons and persons that
the latter's being is thoroughly organised by social norms. Social norms are
constitutive of the very 'form' or structure of the life of spiritual beings or
persons by being constitutive of their intentionality, and more exactly of both
the theoretical and the practical aspects of it.
As to the theoretical side, it is by learning to organise its experiences in terms

of empirical concepts that the subject begins to grasp the world epistemically
in terms of structures that transcend the immediacy of the relevance-structure
determined by wanton desire. In Hegel's terminology, this is what is at issue
in the transition from mere immediate sensuous consciousness (sinnliche
Bmusstsein) to perception (Wahrnehm~ng)?~
In perception the world is organised in terms of empirical concepts, and it is in virtue of these that the epistemic subject can find structures of its own thinking instantiated in the world
and thus 'itself' in the world. Importantly for us, this is a matter of interpersonality since empirical concepts are embodied in a natural language, and
administered, as to their content, by a collective of language-users recognising each other as co-authorities of correct word-usage.83Concrete freedom in
the epistemic sense of being with oneself in objects of knowledge is hence
constitutivelydependent on collectivenorm-administration that requires recognition between administrators.
As to the practical side, shared administration of conceptually organised epistemic world-view is only possible among subjects who also pacify and
organise their practical intentionalities and therefore concrete co-existence by

collectively authorised and administered practical norms. This similarly
requires recognition between co-authorities or -administrators. Importantly,
neither the norms of theoretical nor of practical intentionality are merely
external demands on subjects. Much of them are internalised or embodied
through habitualisation into a "second nature" which is mostly effective in
persons without explicit awareness or reflection." This means that persons on
the one hand, and the normative structures--or institutions-f
their shared
social life on the other hand are not separate realities. Rather, persons are
embodiments of social institutions. Yet, this does not mean that persons are
therefore determined or unfree, since norms and institutions are dependent
on persons for their authorisation and administration and since persons can,
under the right circumstances, be concretely free in the norms and institutions that structure their being.85
But what does respect have to do with all of this? Above we considered the
possibility that it is mutual fear that represents the will of others in subjects
and makes them norm-obeying beings. As we saw, although this view is not
completely unmotivated it is also faced with severe problems as in account of
what Hegel is after. Not only would it be very strange to think of mutual fear
as a central element of the essence of the life-form in a sense in which it is also
vocation or ethical ideal. Moreover, this also seems highly one-sided as an
account of what makes the volition of others embodied in social norms subjectively authoritative for persons and thus distinguishes persons motivationally from mere wantons in the deontological d i m e n s i ~ nEspecially
.~~
in the
case of semantic and other social norms of theoretical intentionality it would
seem rather simplifying to think that we take each other as authoritative of
them exclusively out of fear. On the other hand, Hegel does give fear a role in
the transition from nature to spirit, and it also seems unrealistic to think that
fear has nothing to do with what makes humans norm-obeying creatures.
Hegel's normative essentialism provides a solution. Both fear and the 'personalising' recognitive attitude of respect can be included in an account of the
right kind of mutual mediation of intentionalities by thinking them as opposite ends of a scale. Whereas fear is a way of the will of another being 'authoritative' for a subject, which is furthest from the normative essence of the
life-form, respect is the way of this being the case whereby the normative
178
Heikki Ihheimo
essence is actualised in the deontological dimension of interpersonal relations. More exactly, mutual respect is the way of mutual authorisation which
f d y instantiates concrete freedom as mutual conscious-beingin one another.
Most authority-relations instantiate concrete freedom less than fully, which
means that fear for others plays some motivational role in them.
What exactly is then the difference between fear and respect as intersubjective attitudes? Hegel rarely uses the word 'respect' (Respekt or Achtung), nor
does he clarify the conceptual distinction at stake here too explicitly, but let
me suggest a way of rational reconstruction. The decisive difference is that
whereas one fears the other because of, or "for the sake of" something elsein the extreme case for one's l i f m n e does not respect the other because of
something else. That is, the motivating impetus of respect does not stem from
some other end, but is intrinsic to the attitude. This is the radical sense in
which the recognitive attitude of respect is an affirmation of the other: it is
being moved by the other's volition intrinsically, independently of further considerations or motivations. By being intrinsically moved by each other's will
subjects mutually "affirm" each other as underived or original sources of
authoritys7This brings about a mutual mediation of volitions in virtue of
which subjects can also find themselves in each other in a way that makes
them concretely free with regard to each other: I know my will as having
intrinsic authority on your will, and vice versa. This is what makes our relationship genuinely interpersonal on the deontological dimension and makes
us partners in a genuine 'we1.
Thinking of fear and respect as opposite ends of a scale enables one to
think of the constitution of social norms and institutions through the practical
attitudes of subjects in a way that both allows for variation in the quality of
the attitudes and also grasps these constitutive attitudes as having an irnmanent ideal or normative essence. We can hence say that although accepting
(and intemalising) norms for merely prudential reasons such as the ultimate
fear of death can be constitutive of (at least some) norms and institutions,
in merely grudgingly accepting norms and institutions one is not concretely free in them, just as one is not concretely free in any other factors
that merely present limitations on or conditions for the realisation of one's
pre-given ends.88
In terms of Hegel's illustration, although the bondsman is a norm-oriented
creature, he is not concretely free in the norms that structure his existence.
Concrete freedom in, or with regard to, norms and institutions requires that
one has genuine authority on them and can thus relate to them as instantiations of one's own will. Even in a state of shared mutual mastery and slavery
the attitude constitutive of norm-acceptance is still fear, which does not enable subjects to be fully free with regard to each other and therefore also not
with regard to the norms and institutions whereby they live. It is only to the
extent that the relevant subjects have mutual respect whereby they mutually
count for each other as original sources of authority (that is, as persons) that
this can take place.
Recognition as love
The above account of concrete freedom and personhood as constituted by

mutual recognition as respect is, however, only a partial account of Hegel's
holism and normative essentialism in social ontology. As much as the deontological dimension of norms, authority and administration has been at the centre of the recent wave of Hegel-reception in the United States-most
prominently by Brandom, Pinkard and Robert Pippin-it is still a one-sided
take on what Hegel is after. Indeed, the idea that Hegel's concept of spirit
could be grasped exclusively in terms of a deontological discourse of rules or
norms and their collective administration is explicitly contrary to one of the
most important elements of Hegel's though running through his career: his
rejection of Kantian 'legalism' as the exclusive framework in which to think
of morals, rationality and freedom, and his supplementation or substitution
of it with a fuller account including an axiological dimension as ~ e l l . 8 ~
The concept of recognition is at the very core of the implementation of this

programmatic idea of Hegel's in that it covers both the deontological dimension of mutual respect, and the axiological dimension of mutual love. It is
often said that the concept of love had a central importance for Hegel in his
early writings, and that it lost this position in his later work. This is true, yet it
does not mean that love lost all of its foundational significance for the later
Hegel. Strikingly, when Hegel in his late Encyclopaedia talks of "universal
self-consciousness", the state of mutual recognition that is, he always mentions love.g0Even if only in passing, in the relevant passages Hegel clearly
uses love as an example of the actualisation of the structure of concrete freedom in intersubjective relationships-or in other words of interpersonal
recognition?'
My claim is that in order to make good sense of what is going on in these p a s

sages love has to be understood systematically as a recognitive attitude alongside respect, and as having an important role in fulfilling at least function (b)
that recognition has for Hegel (see p. 170-171). In short: it is not enough for
the full actualisation of concrete freedom that subjects respect each other as
co-authors of a space of shared (epistemic and practical) norms, and it is questionable whether without the slightest degree of mutual love they could even
have mutual respect (instead of just mutual fear). Further, supposing that it is
unlikely that any stable system of social norms could be based on fear or other
prudential motives alone, without the slightest hint of intrinsic interpersonal
motivation, and supposing that the intrinsic motivating attitude of respect is,
in practice, impossible in complete absence of the intrinsically motivating
attitude of love, it maybe even impossible (a) to get from nature to spiritthat is, to establish a stable form of co-existence above animality--at all
wholly without love. Let me try to substantiate these claims.
The inadequacy of an exclusively deontological reconstruction of what Hegel
is after is rather obvious in his illustrative story of the master and the bondsman. What is very important in the story is the coming about of a care- or
concern-structure in which the subject is worried about its future and prepares
for it. Hegel writes:
The crude destruction of the immediate object [defining of animal wantonform of universality in the satisfaction of need is an enduring
ness, H.I.] is replaced by the acquisition, preservation and formation of it

[...]-the
means and a solicitude caring for and securing fut~re.9~
What Hegel is talking about here, is the replacement of the immediacy of

wantonness by a temporally extended concern for self (or self-love, to borrow
Harry Frankfurt)-a practical self-relation which is simultaneously a new
kind of temporally extended practical relation to objectivity. For Hegel and
many of those influenced by him such as Marx this introduces the theme of
work, which Marx thought of as the essential feature of the human life-form
distinguishing it from animal ones. Caring about one's future satisfaction of
needs and thus about oneself involves "acquisition, preservation and formation" of objects. Importantly, Hegel depicts this new form of future-oriented
practical intentionality-involving a means-end-structure, or representations
i
'i
t
!
i
j
5
1
of non-present future ends and instruments for achieving or securing themas having its origin in the intersubjective encounter.
Whereas in the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel focuses almost exclusively

on the cultivating effects of the master-bondsman-relation on the bondsman,
in the mature Philosophy of Spirit he puts more emphasis on, or makes
clearer also, the cultivating effect of the relationship on the master.
Immediately before the passage quoted above Hegel writes that since also
the bondsman, as "the means of masterdom," has to "preserved alive,"
the master and bondsman are united by "needs and the concern for their satisfa~tion"?~
Not only is the bondsman concerned about the well-being of the
master out of fear, also the master is concerned about the well-being of
the bondsman for instrumental reasons. The needs and concerns for
their future satisfaction of both the master and the bondsman become thus
intertwined. What Hegel does here is to describe the future-oriented practical intentionality replacing immediate wanton desire as involving an
intersubjective mediation from the start. Abstracting from the quasi-empirical
details of the illustrative story, what reason could Hegel possibly have to do
so? That is, why should we think that a future-oriented practical intentionality requires or involves some kind of intersubjective mediation from the
start?
[...I
as
One perfectly good reason to think this way is the fact that most likely anything but the most rudimentary capacity to represent non-prevailing states
of affairs, and thereby future, is a social achievement. Why? Because it
requires conceptually organised capacities of representation. 'Representationf
(Vo~stellung)~~
is Hegel's general name for the psychological operations
responsible for the form of theoretical intentionality that he calls perception
(Wahrnehmung).Essential for all of these is that they involve a subsumation of
the givenness of senses under general concepts (allgemeine Vorstellung) which
requires memory (for associating past and present sensations), and makes
possible phenomena such as "hope and fear," which are modes of representing future. In his mature Philosophy of Nature Hegel writes:
[me] dimensions [of past and future, H.I.] do not occur in nature
subsistent differences;they are necessary only in subjective representation, in

memory and in fear or hope."
182
Heikki IWheirno
In other words, past and future, as "subsistent differences" which means constitutive of the present, are there only for subjects capable of cross-temporal
representation and in Hegel's view this involves a cross-temporal carestructure in which future states of affairs matter. There is any point in having
representations about the future only if future is given in the present as something one can be fea@l or hopeful about. This is the case within the perspective
of subjects with a temporally extended concern for themselves. As to the argument for the inherent sociality of this form of intentionality the decisive issue
is that it requires (save perhaps the most rudimentary modes) language as the
medium and reservoir of conceptual operation^^^, and that languageis dependent on the intersubjective practice of administration of conceptual or semantic
nature
n0rms.9~
Hence, the concept-language-norm-administration-hvohhg
of representative capacities does support Hegel's way of describing futureoriented practical intentionality as a social phenomenon from the start.
Yet, Hegel is clearly after something more than this. If this would be the whole
story about the intersubjective mediation of future-oriented intentionality
characteristic of human persons, it would still leave their concern- or carestructure fundamentallyegoistic and the axiological dimension of their practical intentionality with regard to each other merely prudential. In Hegel's
illustration both the master and the bondsman care intrinsically only about
their own future, and merely prudentially or instrumentally about the future
of the other. Both have thus love for themselves (and are therefore persons in
Frankfurt's terms)-yet they do not have love for each other.
It is through mutual love for each other whereby subjects affirm each other's
intentionality so that their care- or concern-structures become mutually constitutive in a way that is an instantiation of concrete freedom. Whereas the
master and the bondsman both only care about the well-being of the other
instrumentally, each for one's own sake, mutually loving persons both care
about the well-being of the other intrinsically, each for the other's own sake.
The recognitive attitude of love for the other is an unconditional affirmation
of the other, not as an original source of authority, but as an irreducible perspective of concerns and thus as an original source of value. Loving the other
involves a mediation or 'triangulation' of perspectives of concerns, analogically to how respecting the other involves a mediation or triangulation of perspectives of authority.
F
/
1
F
&
;!
1
u'
Hollsrn and Nomatlve Essenttallsm In Hegel's Soc~alOntology 183
What happens in a state of mutual love is thus that the subjects' temporal
perspectives of "fear and hope" are mutually mediated and "caring for and
securing future" becomes a joint project where I am intrinsically motivated to
work also for your and therefore for our future, and the same goes for you.
The 'we' is here not merely a bond constituted by prudential or egoistic
motives, as in the relationship of the master and the bondsman, but rather a
unity of practical intentionalities where the concerns of both (or all) parties
are equally important in sculpting the world in axiological terms in the perspective of both. When both know that the other has (at least some) love for
one, each is self-consciousin the other by finding one's concerns affirmed by
the loving other who has internalised them as constitutive of his own
c0ncerns.9~
Analogically with fear and respect on the deontological dimension, Hegel's

normative essentialism allows one to conceive of instrumentalisation and
other prudential motives on the one hand, and love on the other hand as
opposite ends of a scale of attitudes constitutive of the mediation of practical
intentionalities on the axiological dimension. Thereby we can think of sociality in the constitution of the axiological features of the world for persons
(their ends, constituents of ends, things and states with positive or negative
instrumental value) and thus in their motivation-structuresin a way that both
allows for variation in the quality of the constitutive intersubjective attitudes
and also grasps these as having an immanent ideal or normative essence.
As to the question whether it is possible to get from nature to spirit at all

wholly without love, or in other words whether love is essential for the lifeform of human persons not only (b) as an immanent ideal but also (a) as
a necessary condition (see p. 170),we should acknowledge at least that there
is a genuine question. Thinkers as different as George Herbert Mead and
Talcott Parsons have thought that the success of a life-form driven by a purely
egoistic (more than wanton) concern-structures is unlikely.99One reason to
think this way is the comparative cognitive complexity of mediation of carestructures (and they have to be somehow mediated in shared co-existence in
any case) in exclusivelyprudential terms, in comparison to a mediation based
at least in part on intrinsic concern for the needs and well-being of others.
The latter is cognitively simpler since reduces the need for the kind of (tacit or
explicit) deliberation involved in taking the concerns of others into account in
one's own concerns prudentially.
Put simply: life is immensely more complicated if anyone only helps anyone,
or cooperates, when it seems all things considered the prudential thing for
oneself to do, than it is if subjects are at least sometimes moved by each other's needs intrinsically, without any further considerations. The more cognitively demanding the simplest forms of co-existence (say, between mothers
and their offspring) are, the less likely they are to succeed under conditions of
cognitive finitude. This does not prove the strict necessity of love for the lifeform of human persons, but it does at least suggest that humans should be
extremely intelligent to navigate a completely loveless social world where
any motivation for interaction would be conditional, if not on explicit calculation of personal advantage, at least on trust that such calculation would
favour interacting.There is, further, the question raised above whether respect
or intrinsic motivation by the will of others is possible in complete lack of
love or intrinsic motivation by the well-being of others. If it is not, then love is
hardly any less important for the constitution of the social and institutional
world of human persons than respect is.lo0
To be clear, the details presented above of what exactly recognition in Hegel's

sense is, based on what he thinks it does and the fact that he thinks of it as an
instantiation of concrete freedom as self-consciousness in other subjects, are
not something Hegel himself spells out lucidly anywhere. In the Selfconsciousness-chapter of both the published and lectured versions of his
mature Philosophy of Subjective Spirit he tends to talk of the deontological
and the axiological dimensions without a clear distinction, even though distinguishing them is necessary for making clear sense of the totality of what he
says. Similarly, he often conflates the interpersonal forms of recognition with
a recognition or acknowledgement of the deontic or institutional powers of
the other, which easily leads to an obfuscation of the constitutive role of interpersonal recognition for norms and institutions.lm
This is all symptomatic of the fact that Hegel mainly focuses on the fairly
abstract structural features of concrete freedom as self-consciousnessin other
subjects. He is much less focused--even in the illustrative story of the master
and bondsman-on clarifying what exactly the interpersonal attitudes of recognition constitutive of universal self-consciousness have to be and how
exactly they relate to the closely connected intersubjective motives of fear and
r
1
I
i
j
instrumentalisation (that is, instrumental valuing) of the other. These are

issues we have just tried to clarify, drawing on Hegel's own statements and
conceptual resources.
VIII. Actualising the normative essence
We should now have a grasp of the basic ideas and principles of Hegel's
holism and normative essentialism in social ontology. Let us return to the idea
that may be the most difficult of all to swallow: the self-realisation of the essence
of spirit or the human life-form. What sense can we make of this idea?
A central issue here is the constitutive self-reflexivity of the life-form in question, or in other words the fact that what persons take themselves to be
is partly constitutive of what they are.'02 Applied to essentialism, the point
is the answer to the question 'what do we take ourselves to be essentially?' is
partly constitutive of the answer to the question 'what are we essentially?'lo3
This does not mean that anyone can individually make oneself essentially
this or that by the simple act of thinking that this is what one essentially is.
And even if people have collectively much greater capacities for self-definition, even collectively they do not have a magical power to make themselves
essentially something simply by entertaining thoughs or beliefs about themselves. The point is rather that collectively taking something as essential to us
is constitutive of what we are through being an ideal towards which we are
oriented in practice. This is the sense in which the essence of the human lifeform is not simply a given "determination," but a "vocation" (the German
word 'Bestirnmung' combines both these meanings) for humans in Hegel's
view. It is because what humans collectively take themselves to be essentially
is (thereby)a vocation for them, that the essence has whatever tendency it has
to self-actualisation.
The above example of using artifacts is illuminating here. The lifeform in general can be thought of as the totality of all the real practices that
persons engage in collectively. Or, as Hegel puts it, it is the "universal work
[...I the activity of everyone".'" As in the case of the particular practice
focused on chairs and sitting, also in the case of the totality of all practices,
'taking' something as essentially something should be understood in the
sense of 'common sense' that is not merely 'in the heads' of the participants,
but is an 'objective' form of thinking at work in practice. What works in practice is never completely up to grabs but depends on numerous factors many
of which are simply unchangeable (say,the law of gravitation) or at least relatively stable and slow to change (say, the average shape of human backsides).
Common sense about normative essences is constantly put to test in practice by such factors. If we are going to talk sensibly about thinking about or
taking something as the essence of the human life-form as constitutive of it's
being the essence, then 'thinking or taking' has to be understood exactly in
this sense: as common sense at work and tested in the collectivelife of humanity at large.
Thought so, Hegel's global actualist normative essentialism about the human
life-form involves the claim that concrete freedom is a self-actualising essence
in being an immanent ideal actually at work in the totality of human practices. Hence, what he means with 'concrete freedom' should be part of more
or less universally shared practice-constituting common sense. Can such a
bold claim be validated with evidence? What kind of evidence would be
appropriate?Or to put it the other way around, what kind of evidence would
refute it? These are obviously large questions and I will only make a few suggestive remarks concerning them.
To start with, claiming that mutual recognition (whichis the central instantiation of concrete freedom) is an immanent ideal of all interpersonal relations is
perhaps not as outrageous as at least sweeping rejections of normative essentialism would make it seem. A good way of construing the claim is to say that
to the extent that any human relationship or practice does not actualise interpersonal recognition it is less than ideal in ways that are accessible to normal
participants, or are part of their common sense.
The common sense quality of recognition and its absence is made robust by
the fact that the goodness of recognition and the badness of its absence is both
functional and ethical in nature. This is what the figures of the master and the
bondsman illustrate well. As to the deontological dimension, to the extent
that their relationship is founded on coercion and fear, rather than on mutual
authorisation of its terms or norms by both (or all) parties respecting each
other as co-authorities, the relationship is inherently unstable and vulnerable
to violent collapse or revolution due to contingent changes in the equation of
power. Any moderately intelligent slave-owner or dictator will be able to tell
this much.
Thisfunctional deficiency of relationships and practices grounded on coercion

and fear, rather than shared authority, is hardly independent of their being
ethically deficient or pathological in ways that are robustly commonsensical.
If anything is a more or less universally comprehensible, clearly moral or ethical experience for more or less psychologically normal persons, then the
experiencethat others do not respect one as having authority on the norms or
terms of co-existence (even potentially, as adults do with regard to children),
but force one to obey their will. It is the more or less universally human obviousness of this fact that explains why there is a tendency in slave-owning
societies towards the often seriously self-deceptive and delusive attempt to
try to imagine or discursively construe the slaves in general as by their nature
less than full psychological persons in the sense of lacking a serious moral
perspective, or at least as incapable of sharing authority and therefore as
being in need of external control. In other words, there is a tendency among
slave-owners to try to imagine or construe the slaves as either essentially different from oneself and one's peers, or then as inherently deficient in their
capacity to actualise the essence that one shares with them. It is no news that
when common sense collides with strong enough interests, the former does
not always prevail. Yet, abolitionists rarely need to perform particularly
demanding intellectual acrobatics to point out the self-deceptive nature of
such exercises of imagination or construction.
Lack of recognition and therefore concrete freedom on the deontological

dimension of interpersonal relationships is tied to lack of concrete freedom
with regard to norms and institutions: if I am not attributed authority on
institutions by others and therefore do not have it, I do not find my will
instantiated in them. On the other hand, if I am the sole authority of institutions (a slave-master or dictator), I do find my will instantiated in the institutions, but they are not properly other to, or independent of me. For me they
are not made of genuine norms or laws at all, and to that extent I am therefore
not a norm-governed being. Even norms and institutions based on mutual
threat and fear do not actualise concrete freedom since they bind individuals
mostly in the way of a hostile or alien otherness.
Somewhat analogically on the axiological dimension, to the extent that

relationships and practices are characterised by no or merely instrumental concern, for the life or well-being of other participants, they are functionally unstable, and this is partly due to their being ethically deficient
188
Heikki Ikheimo
in a robustly commonsensical way. There are tendencies of thinkingimpressed by aspects of modern economics and related theoretical enterprises-that pure egoism is a sufficient motivational foundation for an
organisation of human co-existence, but they cannot boast of a particularly wide global intuitive appeal. One reason why the idea is not convincing, when said aloud, is its commonsensical ethical reprehensibility:
most people would find social life based on pure egoism as hardly worth
living, and certainly not worth sacrificing much for.lo5Again, if anything
is a more or less universally comprehensible clearly moral or ethical experience, then that others do not care about one or one's well-being at all, or
care about it purely instrumentally. From another point of view, it is part
of well-established common sense among humanity widely spread across
cultures that life will be lonely and miserable if one has no intrinsic concern
for anyone else except for oneself. If anything has been thoroughly tested in
practice for as long as human memory and written record extends, then this.
Whatever the details of one's favourite theoretical account of this robustly
commonsensical truth, they clearly have to do with, if not unchangeable, at
least extremely slowly changing facts about the constitution of human
persons.
Also on the axiological dimension, lack of recognition and therefore of concrete freedom is tied to lack of concrete freedom with regard to the socially
constituted world more generally. The less people care about each other's
well-being intrinsically, the less it shows in their actions that mould and
structure the social world. Since in a finite world egoists have to limit their
spheres of egoistic activity with regard to each other, each will find his or her
needs or claims of happiness and well-being directly met or affirmed by only
that part of the world which belongs to his or her own respective sphere,
whereas elsewhere they are met or affirmed only "with a priceu--only if
someone else gains a personal advantage by meeting them. There is a clear
sense in which people can find their needs and claims of happiness affirmed
by, and therefore be self-conscious in, items of the world that are built or
made available to meet their needs and claims without (or at least not merely
with) an expectation of compensation, a sense in which they will not find
themselves affirmed in items they have to buy. The latter do not exist for my
sake, but for the sake of the instrumental value I have as a needy being for the
one selling.'"
'r
1
1
iI
Hollsrn and Normative Essentlallsrn In Hegel's Soc~alOntology 189
All in all, there seem to be at least some grounds for arguing for a rather
robustly universal commonsensicality of the thought that human relations
and practices are non-ideal to the degree that they do not instantiate interpersonal recognition. Yet, this necessary component of the self-reflective and
self-constitutive essentialism about the human life-form in Hegel's sense of
course also has to be compatible with a historical variability of human societies: not always and everywhere has it been thought that any relationship is
non-ideal or deficient to the extent that it does not instantiate recognition, or
that anyone's life is non-ideal to the extent that she is not concretely free
with regard to others or with regard the social and institutional world.
It would probably be too simple to describe this merely in terms of collective
self-deception convenient for the prevailing masters.
As Hegel puts it in the introduction to his (posthumously edited and published) lectures on philosophy of history, the Orientals "knew" only that "one
is free," the Greeks and Romans "knew" that "some are free," and first the
"German nations," under the influence of Christianity, "attained the consciousness" that all are free, or in other words that "man, as man is free, that
it is the freedom of spirit which constitutes his essence". What is interesting
in this statement are not so much the debatable historical details, but the
importance of "knowing" or "consciousness" that one is free for being free.
Hegel seems to be saying that it is (at least partly) because the Orientals did
not know that they are all free, that they were not allfree; similarly it is because
the slave-owning Greeks did not know that all are free, that their slaves were
not free; finally it is because the German nations gained consciousness of universal freedom that they became actually free.lw
"Consciousness" and "knowing" (Wissen)have both very broad meanings for

Hegel, standing basically for any intentional state with content in the objectform." Thus, in this context they could in principle stand either for knowing
or being conscious of (the fact) that x is free, where this is the appropriate
epistemic response to the independent fact that x is free, or for willing that x is
free where this can be part of making it the case that x is free. I suggest that
both construals grasp an aspect of what Hegel is after.
On the one hand, "knowingffor "consciousne~s~~

of freedom as the essence of
man is in Hegel's view constitutive of humans' becoming free through its
being introduced, as he writes, as "a principle" "in worldly affairs," by being
190
Heikki IkZheimo
"applied" in the world and thereby leading slowly to a "cultivation" of states,

governments and constitutions. In other words, freedom as the essence of
humanity is actualised as it slowly becomes practice-constituting common
sense on a broad front. In this sense it involves an aspect of willing. (Since this
does not happen overnight, as if a sudden change of mind, "slavery did not
cease immediately on the reception of Chri~tianity".)'~~
On the other hand, even if consciousness of freedom being the essence of
humanity is constitutive of the actualisation of the essence, this consciousness
is also responsive to independent facts about humanity that are part of what
makes it the case that freedom is their essence in the sense of an immanent
ideal. In short: freedom did not become the essence of the human life-form
only when humans came up with (originally religious) representations that it
is their essence. Again, this is something Hegel illustrates with the figures of
the lord and the slave, which he uses as an ahistorical image of the dysfunctionality and tendency to self-overcoming of intersubjective relations that do
not actualise concrete freedom.
Hegel is very well aware of the fact that it will make a difference to social
life when people become reflectively conscious about important facts about
social life, or in other words when (religious or other) cultural representations
of and models for thinking about them become available. Yet, even such representations will change social life only gradually, and at least in the long run
they can only do this by being responsive to partly independent and even if
not unchanging, at least very slowly changing facts about what they represent. For Hegel, the actualisation of the essence of the human life-form, the
core of all progress in history, is an actualisation of given potentials. These
potentials need not be thought of as in some implausible sense eternal (to be
traced back to the Big Bang and beyond), yet they are very slow to change
and therefore fairly resistant to historical variation, including deliberate engineering. No wonder, we can barely even imagine what it would mean to think
of a mode of co-existence based exclusively on mutual fear and/or instrumentalisation as a practice-immanent ideal of both functionally and ethically
good human societies.'1
On the other hand, Hegel understood perfectly well that distorting cultural representations or ideologies have the capacity to obstruct common
sense from grasping the essence and immanent ideal of human affairs, and
therefore the capacity to support modes of social life that for outsiders or
later generations are staggeringly obviously far from ideal. Sometimes, those
not in the grips of the representations will judge such modes of social life
'inhuman', which is to say so far from the essence of the life-form of human
persons that they approach the blurry boundaries of what belongs to that
form at all.'"
As for the importance of Christianity for Hegel, it is illuminating to note that

both authority and love are attributes of the Christian God, and that Hegel's
philosophical reinterpretation, involving a systematic reduction of the
Christian trinity to one of its components-'spirit'-makes
authority and love
essential attributes of humanity, or of human life that actualises its essence. It
is not that Hegel uncritically adopts certain Christian dogmas as the backbone of his social ontology, but rather that he thinks they provide metaphorical representations of essential structures of the life-form of human persons,
the non-metaphoricalrepresentation of which is the task of philos~phy."~
Conclusion
What is the contemporary relevance of Hegel's social ontology? As with all

genuine classics in philosophy, such a question will have many answers.
I have suggested that currently it might be useful in providing means for a
general reorientation in social ontology towards a more holistic and in-depth
approach, where the social constitution of persons and thereby the most fundamental levels of the constitution of the social and institutional world in
general would become a serious topic of philosophical investigation.
As for Hegel's normative essentialism, I am not convinced that it has been so

far understood well enough for a conclusive judgment about its viability to
be passed. The main reason why I believe it too is an aspect of Hegel's social
ontology that has relevance today is that it is a conceptual strategy that is
aimed at getting at the most fundamental practice-immanent convictions or
intuitions of common sense about what makes forms of human co-existence
good. It is a haunting fact-haunting because so much in the current landscape of philosophy speaks against taking it seriously-that the strongest
moral or ethical intuitions we arguably share about human affairs tend to be
articulated in normative essentialist terms. I am referring to the expressions
192
Heiki IHheirno
r
i
Hol~srnand Normat~veEssent~al~srn
In Hegel's Social Ontology 193
As the huge influence of Hegel's thought (with all the battles, distortions and
misunderstandings that belong to its reception-history) testifies, philosophy
that something is 'inhuman', 'inhumane', or 'genuinely or truly human', and

so forth. If one is not at all willing to consider the possibility that there might
be something serious behind such expression, something which they correctly
express in normative essentialist terms, then one is unlikely to find a reassessment of the viability of normative essentialism in social philosophy very
interesting. On the other hand, if one has even a nagging suspicion that there
actually might be something worth a philosophical reconstruction in such
expressions, or the intuitions they express,l13 then taking a fresh look at what
Hegel was really on about with his normative essentialism in social ontology
is, in my view at least, not at all a bad idea.
i
!
is de facto not merely descriptive of the world, but also changes it by becoming part of the reservoir of cultural representations whereby humans collectively try to articulate to themselves what they hold, or what is, essential to
their being. Social ontology is therefore, by its nature, not a harmless enterp r i ~ e . "It~ depends on historically varying empirical details whether the consequences of flawed philosophical conceptualisations are more serious than
the consequences of a widespread lack of philosophical articulation of the
most fundamental facts about human persons and their life-form."7
concretization Hegel's principle of concrete freedom that drifts to Marx's general

direction. Whether this, all things considered, is the right direction to go, and how
far it is good to go, will not be decided simply on conceptual grounds, but by a
myriad empirical things that depend on time and place. Social philosophy with
emancipatory interest, engaged with concrete details, can only be its "own time
[and place] comprehended in thoughts".
3. Whereas those who read Hegel predominantly in light of Kantian legalism in philosophy-that is, in terms of the deontological discourse of autonomy as collective self-authorisationof norms--tend to lose sight of the axiological dimension of
Hegel's project (and thereby the recognitive aspects of what really moves or matters to persons), the young Marx one-sidedly focuses on the axiological dimension
of loven5and looses from sight the deontological dimension. This makes his social ontology defective with regard to social norms and institutions and obstructs
him from grasping clearly the difference between alienated and non-alienated relations to them. Since persons themselves are embodiments of social norms and
institutions, this is a serious theoretical flaw with potentially devastating practical
consequences.
There is of course a major (even if nowadays almost obsolete) stream of

though where normative essentialism, in various, more or less well articulated guises used to be taken seriously. This is the dispersed tradition of
humanist Marxism, the story of which begins with the young Karl Marx.l14
Marx may not have read all the right texts from Hegel, and he may have
read what he read idiosyncratically, but he certainly had an eye both for
Hegel's holism as well as his Aristotelian normative essentialism. In terms of
how I have spelled out the fundamentals of these in this article, three facts
about Marx's own creative appropriation of Hegel are worth mentioning
briefly.
t
i
'Constituting', and 'constitution' can of course mean many things. Here I am

assuming that 'constitution' in the relevant sense is not merely a logical relation, as
J. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality, London, Penguin, 1995, p. 25.

See, for instance, ed. J. Stewart, The Hegel Myths and Legends, Chicago, Northwestern
University Press, 1996.
Notes
1. What Marx means by 'Entfremdung' (variously translated as 'alienation' or 'estrangement') can be reconstructed as the opposite of what Hegel means by 'concrete freedom' as conscious-beingin otherness.Thus, overcoming alienation means
actualising the essence of humanity which is concrete freedom. In Marx's terms this
means actualising the human 'species-being'.
2. Marx radically disagrees with the institutional details of Hegel's Philosophy of Objective Spirit. Perhaps most importantly, whereas Hegel sees private property as an
instantiation of concrete freedom, Marx sees private ownership (especiallyof means
of production) as the main factor leading to alienation. Here the general idea of concrete freedom and its opposite does not, as such, determine which one is the right
view (remember the point about 'necessary contingency'). My discussion of how
lack of recognition in the axiologicaldimension is conducive to the needs and claims
of happiness of persons not being affirmed by the social and institutional world
(since in the world of egoists most things come with a price-tag) was already a
194
Heikki Ikheirno
when we say that a block of marble constitutes a statue under suitable conditions (see
L. Rudder Baker, Persons and Bodies: A Constitution View, Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, 2000). The 'constitution' of the entities, relations and so forth of the
social and institutional world-arguably on any plausible account-involves some
kind of activity by suitable kinds of subjects. For instance, pieces of paper only 'constitute' a dollar bill (in the logical sense)when suitable kinds of subjects 'constitute' them
(in the activity-sense) as such by treating them as such. In the case of persons this is
especially clear: the relevant conditions under which something 'constitutes' a person
include several kinds of 'constitutive' activities, not only by other persons, but also by
the person in question. In more than one way persons are persons by making themselves persons. For more on this, see H. Ikaheimo, "Recognizing Persons," Journal of
Consciousness Studies, vol. 14, no. 5-6. 2007, pp. 224-247. See also A. Laitinen,
"Constitution of persons," in eds. H. Iktiheimo, J. Kotkavirta, A. Laitinen & P. Lyyra
Personhood-Workshop papers of the Conference 'Dimensions of Personhood', Publications
in Philosophy 68, Jyvaskyla, University of Jyvaskyla, 2004, for a critique of the formula 'x constitutes a person'. I basically agree with Laitinen's critique.
This is not to be understood in the simple "attributivist" sense that all there is to
being a person is to be attributed personhood (by attitudes, discourses or whatever).
In contrast, this is all there is to being, say, money (mutatis mutandis). What I am saying
is also meant to be compatible with the possibility that some facts about persons that
are independent of sociality are constitutive of personhood.
When it comes to saying something about the kinds of individual subjects that
their theories imply or require, some leading contemporary social ontologists, such as
Margaret Gilbert and Raimo Tuomela, adopt the methodological abstraction of social
contract theories and take the existence of fully developed and socialised persons as
given. Tuomela expresses this as follows (R. Tuomela, The Philosophy of Sociality: The
Shared Point of View, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007, p. 6): "conceptually we
start with a full notion of a human being as a person". He does say this about the constitution of persons in his most recent book: "This book relies on the conception of
human beings as persons in the sense of the 'framework of agency' that assumes that
(normal) persons are thinking, experiencing, feeling, and acting beings capable of
communication, cooperation, and following rules and norms." (ibid., p. 6); "the capacity and motivation for sharing intentional states is an evolved central aspect of being a
person" (ibid., p. 231). These constitutive capacities are however not a topic, but a presupposition of Tuomela's social ontology (or "philosophy of sociality" to use his own
term). In Gilbert's view "the concept of an individual person with his own goals, and
so on, does not require for its analysis a concept of a collectivity itself unanalysable in
terms of persons and their noncollectivity-involvingproperties." (M. Gilbert, O n Social
Facts, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1989, pp. 435) Gilbert's paradigmatic
,
I
\
I
1
'I
I
!
t
,1
t
1
i
I
i
i
I
Hollsrn and Normative Essentlallsrn In Hegel's Soc~alOntology 195
example of a social phenomenon is two full-fledged persons walking together, where

these can be conceived as "congenital Crusoes" (Gilbert, O n Social Facts, p. 59; see also
Gilbert, "Walking Together: A Paradigmatic Social Phenomenon," Midwest Studies in
Philosophy 15,1990). Other leading contemporary social ontologists, such as John Searle,
content themselves with the evolutionallyobvious fact that the subjective capacities of
individual needed for building and maintaining a world of social and institutional
facts or structures collectively have to be capacities that animals can have developed.
(See Searle, The Construction of Social Reality; see also H. Rakoczy & M. Tomasello, "The
Ontogeny of Social Ontology: Steps to Shared Intentionality and Status Functions,"
ed. S. Tsohatzidis Intentional Acts and Institutional Facts: Essays on John Searle's Social
Ontology, Berlin, Springer, 2007, pp. 113-139, for an argument that Searle reads collective phenomena much too liberally in nature, thereby neglecting fundamental differences between the social ontology of humans and other animals. I am of course not
claiming that nothing useful in this regard has been written by contemporary authors.
See, for instance, Philip Pettit's The Common Mind, Oxford, Oxford University Press,
1993, for an argument for the (in PettitJsview contingent) sociality of mindedness.
B. Preston, The Stuff of Life: Tmards a Philosophy of Material Culture, (bookmanuscript), Chapter 3, contains a thorough critique of Tuomela and Gilbert from this
point of view.
' Hegel-scholars often say that translating 'Geist' as 'mind'is misleading. The way
in which Anthony Crisafi and Shaun Gallagher ("Hegel and the extended mind," A1
and Society, 25,2010, pp. 123-129) use Hegel's concept of objectiveGeist in the extended
mind-debate suggests that it may be less misleading than often thought. I will use
however 'spirit' throughout the text.
See P. Stekeler-Weithofer, "Persons and Practices," in H. W5heimo & A . Laitinen,
Dimensions of Personhood, Exeter, Imprint Academic, 2007, pp. 174-198.
In this paper I abstract from the question whether non-human persons are a real
possibility. I think it is (see Wiheirno, "Recognizing Persons"). Yet, it may be an empirical fact that there are currently no persons among non-human animals (see Iktiheimo,
"Is 'Recognition' in the Sense of Intrinsic Motivational Altruism Necessary for PreLinguistic Communicative Pointing," eds. W. Christensen, E. Schier, J. Sutton
ASCSOSProceedings of the Australasian Societyfor Cognitive Science, Macquarie Centre
for Cognitive Science, 2010, www.maccs.mq.edu.au/news/conferences/2009/
ASCS2009/ikaheimo.html).
lo My usage of 'personhood' is not meant to follow Hegel's usage of 'Personlichkeit',

but to resonate with a wide variety of classic and contemporary ways of using the
term.
l1 To be fair, elements of the received view of Hegel's concept of spirit are not merely
philosopher's folklore, but also put forth in many serious interpretations of Hegel's
196
Heikki Ibheimo
philosophy. One of the most famous of such interpretations is Charles Taylor's Hegel,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1975. Taylor's main mistake in his in many
ways admirable book is to presuppose a pre-given notion of what 'spirit' mean-in
Taylor's view a "cosmic spirit" that "posits the world" (ibid., chapter 3binstead of
simply trying to make sense, without preconceptions, of what it has to mean if it is a
title for what is actually discussed in Hegel's Philosophy of Spirit.
IZ G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel's Philosophy of Subjective Spirit, translated with editorial comments M. J. Petry, Dordrecht, Reidel, 1978-1979 [HPSS], Volume I, p. 83.
l3 Hegel's Encyclopaedic system as a whole consists of Logic, Philosophy of Nature
and Philosophy of Spirit. Philosophy of Spirit consists of Philosophy of Subjective
Spirit, Philosophy of Objective Spirit, and Philosophy of Absolute Spirit. Philosophy
of Subjective Spirit has similarly three parts: Anthropology, Phenomenology and
Psychology.
l4 This particular caricature of Hegel has been reproduced over and over again.
Arecent version is by Hans-Johann Glock in an otherwisevery useful book (H.-J.Glock,
What is Analytic Philosophy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2008, p. 25): "The
German idealists tried to overcome I...] tensions [inherent in Kant's transcendental
idealism] by taking idealism to extremes. The subject furnishes not just the form of
cognition, but also its content. Reality is a manifestation of a spiritual principle which
transcends individual minds, such as Hegel's 'spirit'. Since reality is itself entirely
mental, it can be fully grasped by the mind. Philosophy once more turns into a superscience which encompasses all other disciplines. All genuine knowledge is a priori,
since reason can derive even apparently contingent facts through the method of 'dialectic', which was rehabilitated in the face of Kant's strictures." Further: "Naturalists
2 la Quine, Kantian or Wittgensteinian anti-naturalists and even proponents of
essentialist metaphysics b la Kripke reject the ultra-rationalist Hegelian idea that
philosophy can pronounce a priori on the nature of the world, independently of the
special sciences." (ibid., p. 224) Although the relation of contingency and necessity in
Hegel is a matter of considerable debate, no serious Hegel-scholar who has any real
knowledge about how Hegel actually goes about with his topics in the Philosophy of
Nature, or Philosophy of Spirit, would claim that Hegel really tries to deduce "even
apparently contingent facts" a priori. As the late Michael John Petry, one of the
best experts ever on Hegel's relation to the sciences, has shown in painstaking detail
in his editions of Hegel's Philosophy of Nature and Philosophy of Subjective Spirit
[HPSS], Hegel was highly erudite in the sciences of his time, and far from the stereotypical armchair-speculator who thinks he can pronounce truths about the world
completely "independently of the special sciences". There are numerous places
where Hegel explicitly emphasises the importance of the sciences for a philosophical
comprehension of the world, or ridicules those who demand an a priori deduction
of its details. Further, even if Hegel does reject the Kantian thought that the world
"in itself is strictly in accessible to knowledge, he does not do this by postulating that
"reality itself is entirely mental". Hegel does think that spirit can grasp nature, but this
does not mean that nature itself is spiritual or "mental". Rather it means that nature is
in principle knowable through disciplined scientific and philosophical inquiry. At the
same time however Hegel is critical of any suggestion that the sciences could do
wholly without philosophy. For him the boundary between the sciences and philosophy is more a matter of degree than one of a clear-cut demarcation. On my reading,
Hegel would have been in agreement with Quine's rejection of the analytic/syntheticdistinction, and thereby of a clear demarcation between philosophy on the one hand
and empirical sciences on the other. Against appearance, I do not think that this claim
is incompatible with what Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer is after in his contribution to this
volume: one can both accept that structural descriptions are not mere empirical generalisations, and also accept that they come in various degrees of abstraction.
l5 I say "in principle," since it is arguable that these two texts differ from each other
in significant ways, not merely in the sense of the one being an extended version of the
other. See D. Henrich, "Logical Form and Real Totality: The Authentic Conceptual
Form of Hegel's Concept of the State," in R. Pippin & 0. Hoffe, Hegel on Ethics and
Politics, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004.
l6 D. Stederoth, Hegels Philosophie des subjektiven Geistes, Berlin, Akademie Verlag,
2001, chapter 2 contains a helpful discussion in this theme.
l7 A familiar experience to readers of Hegel is that one has to struggle even to make
sense of what exactly is the issue that Hegel is talking about in a given passage in the
first place. This is at least partly because Hegel almost always has several things going
on in a given passage.
l8 G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen Wood, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 1991 [EPR], p. 21.
l9 ibid., p. 20.
20 'In short, one should not, and does not need to, worry about, say, the monarch, the
estates, or other similar details of Hegel's institutional design in Philosophy of
Objective Spirit, but rather focus on the more abstract levels of conceptualisation
where one is likely to find more generally valid insights about the interconnection of
the constitution of persons and the constitution of the (rest of the) social and institutional world. One can similarly abstract from Hegel's own idiosyncrasies of perspective belonging to the more concrete levels of description, such as his antiquated views
about the natural differencesbetween men and women translating into differences in
psychological constitution and appropriate social role (HPSS, 5397; EPR, I66 ).
21 'Holism' is not to be read as suggesting that in Hegel's view the individual is
determined by the social 'whole', but merely suggesting that Hegel approaches the
constitution of persons and the constitution of the (rest of the) social and institutional
world as an interconnected whole. This, as such, involves yet no claim concerning to
198
Heikki lbheimo
what extent, or how one or the other element of this whole is 'determined' by the
other. Cf. Pettit, The Common Mind, chapters 3 and 4.
" I am thinking of political and critical theory especially. On essentialism in the
beginning of the left-Hegelian tradition, see M. Quante, "Recognition as the Social
Grammar of Species Being in Marx", in this volume.
" In heated discussions such details get easily confused so that someone may, for
instance, end up defending global anti-essentialism, even though his or her real wony
concerns essentialism about something in particular. In principle, there is no pressing
need to extend ones commitment to antiessentialism, say, to trees or chairs, if essentialism about humans or persons is what one in fact worried about-and mostly it is
essentialism about humans or persons that raises worries. Instead of simply condernning essentialism flat out, it is usually a good advice to reflect carefully on which form
of essentialism, about what exactly, and why exactly, one finds problematic, as well as
which form of anti-essentialism, about what exactly, and why exactly one wants to
subscribe to.
" Cf. the subtitle of John Searle's most recent book Making the Social World: The
Structure of Human Civilization, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010.
25 It is of course possible to be a normative essentialist without subscribing to this
teleological idea.
26 A house would be the traditional Aristotelian example of a usable artefact. Note
that not all usable things are artifacts, nor are all artifacts usables. We use natural entities as well, and we can produce things not to be used for anything.
27 Does this mean that it is strictly impossible that there are chair-designers who do
not think it is essential to chairs to be good to sit on, or who do not have an idea of
what makes something good to sit on? Perhaps not. The normative essentialist conceptualist strategy does not stipulate necessary and sufficient conditions for something's being x, but rather focuses on the essence or ideal of x which is determined by
what works best in real practices. The question "how far" from the essence something
has to be so that it ceases to be x altogether has usually no definite answer in practice.
In social ontology the usefulness of conceptualising the world in terms of necessary
and sufficient conditions is often less than clear. See, for instance, Michael Bratman's
stipulation of what he calls "shared cooperative activity (SCA)" in M. Bratman 'Shared
Cooperative Activity', The Philosophical Review, Vol. 101, No. 2,1992, pp. 32741. If and
only if something fulfils the conditions stipulated by Bratman, it is what he calls SCA.
Whether picking out exactly SCA's in the world has much practical value is debatable.
My view is that normative essentialism is, as a rule, the more useful conceptual strategy in social ontology since it grasps how the social world is actually structured.
Wittgensteinians might doubt that all sittable chairs have to share any single
feature, but this is not a challenge to the argument since it only concerns the general
Holism and Nonnative Essentialism in Hegel's Social Ontology 199
feature or property of sittability, not its constituents. The real life challenge of denying
that sittability is essential to chairs would be to convince people of the idea that being
sittable is merely an accidental feature of chairs. Note that we are not debating whether
being a chair is an essential property of all those things that are chairs. Suffice it to say
that I do not believe there is a perspective-independent answer to that question. What
is essential in that sense depends on what is relevant from the point of view of a particular practice such as sitting or, say, atom physics.
29 A counter-argument: Talking of chairs and other usable artifacts in essentialist
terms covers from view issues of power. For instance, the fact that chairs and other
usable artifacts are made for people of average size and functionality makes people of
different sizes and functionality 'disabled' with regard to the material culture of usable artifacts which structures so much of what we are actually able to do. This is not a
matter of essences but of power of some people over others, and discussing it in essentialist terms only covers up the issues of power involved. A reply: Saying that the
essences of chairs and similar things are determined by social practices is perfectly
compatible with the point of the counter-argument and thus it is not a counterargument at all. The matter of power is the matter of whose authority and needs count
in the structuration of the relevant practices, which determine the essences.
Essentialism on items of the social and institutional world should not be confused
with naturalisation or reijication of them.
30 Note that there are two senses of 'constitution' at play here: 1. the physical construction chairs, 2. the taking or treating of chairs as chairs in real practices.
Let me address one further potential point of critique, which is the observation
that different chairs (or, as I would rather say, different things called 'chair') can serve
different functions. Some can be for show, some for sitting for short periods, some for
maintaining good posture, some are meant to be uncomfortable so that sitters do not
fall in sleep (say, in a Church) or stay too long (say, at McDonalds), others are meant to
imp*ess your friends or function as investment, and so on. But this is merely saying
that actually not all of the things called 'chairs' have the same essential property or
properties. Yet, it is true of each of these things that it has some essential properties
determined by its function in some real practice or practices. Of each of them it is true
that it can do its job better or worse as an exemplar of what it is. That the same thing
can be a very good 'getting-rid-of-customers-once-they've-paid-chair' and a very bad
'enjoy-an-afternoon-with-your-family-chair'
shows that essences are relative to practice and that the same physical thing can be included in different practices. Hence,
conceiving all things called 'chairs' as having the same general essential property of
'sittability' is an idealisation. Yet, such idealisations are themselves part of how the
social world is actually organised-by serving the need for different human practices (such as making money from corn and fat on the one hand, and raising families
200
Heikki lkheimo
on the other) to be mutually compatible enough, or to enable a sufficient degree of

commonness of common sense needed for well-enough-functioning co-existence.
Complex modern societies are characterized by multiple practices and essences being
at work in almost any situation. Yet, there are practical limitations to how dispersed or
mutually antagonistic they can be so that organised, peaceful co-existence is still possible. I thank Arto Laitinen and Paul Formosa for pressing me on these issues and
Formosa for examples.
32 Note that this is far from saying that usable artifacts are what they are simply by
virtue of their creator's intentions, as in R. Dipert, Artifacts, Art Works, and Agency,
Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1993.
33 Here (a) is a commitment to actualist essentialism in general, (b)-(c)comprise the
further commitment to its normative version, and (d) the further commitment to teleology shared by Aristotle and Hegel.
34 Dieter Henrich ("Logical form and real totality") argues that the principle of
syllogism (understood in an ontological sense unique to Hegel) is a central structuring principle of Philosophy of Spirit. This is very clear also in Hegel's discussion
of recognition, especially in the chapter on 'Lordship and Bondage' in the 1807
Phmomenology of Spirit, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1977 [PSI, 55178-196. In
what follows, I will abstract from this fact, yet intend my discussion to be compatible
with it.
35 Some interpreters view absolute negation as the basic principle of Hegel's philosophy in general. See, for example, eds. C. Butler & C. Seiler, Hegel's Letters,
Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1984, p. 18. On absolute negation, spirit and
freedom, see HPSS, 55381-382; on absolute negation in the relationship of the master
and the bondsman, see PS, 5187, 5191; on absolute negation as the essence of "selfconsciousness," see 5194.
36 Hegel's critique of negative freedom of course only bites in cases where y in the
idea of 'x's being free from determination by y' really is something that is not a merely
contingent, but a necessary determinant of x. Think of outer and inner nature, other
people and social institutions. One cannot be abstractly free from these factors and
still lead a life as (and be, since for living beings being is living) an embodied, social
subject, such as human persons essentially are.
37 One example is the solar system, where each body is determined as what it is by
not being any of the others and by being influenced by each of them. The influence a
heavenly bodies on another is not an alien influence since it is only by virtue of these
mutual influences that the bodies are what they are as members of a system (sun,
planets, moons and so forth). Similarly, in an animal organism each organ is and functions as what it is by virtue of mutual 'non-alien' determination by all the other organs.
?'1
1
f
I
I
j
I
1
!
I
f
Holism and Normative Essentialism in Hegel's Soaal Ontology 20 1
With the introduction of consciousness or intentionality in Philosophy of Spirit

concrete freedom gains a radically new meaning however, since there the relata in
question are relata of a subject-object-relation.
38 HPSS, 413-415.
39 HPSS, 55 413-423, 424-437 and 95 413-439 respectively.
This fact has been a constant source of fundamental misunderstanding among
readers since there is a natural tendency to think that iself-mnstiousness~in Hegel
means more or less what it usually means in philosophy. See, for instance K. Cramer,
"Bewusstsein und Selbstbewusstsein; Vorschlige zur Rekonstruktion der systernatischen Bedeutung einer Behauptung in 424 der Berliner Enzyklopadie der Philosophischen Wissenschaften," in D. Henrich, Hegels philosophische Psychologie, Bonn,
Bouvier, 1979, and my critical discussion of Cramer in H. Ik&eimo, Self-consciousness
and Intersubjectivity--A
Study of Hegel's Encyclopaedia Philosophy of Subjective Spirit
(1830), Publications in Philosophy, Jyvaskyla, University of Jyvaskyla, 2000, pp. 15-19
and 41-47. (Available in the internet: http://mq.academia.edu/HeikkiIkaheimo/
Books). S. Jenkins, "Hegel's Concept of Desire," in Journal of the History of Philosophy,
vol. 47, no. 1,2009, pp. 103-130 is a recent example of this misunderstanding, but one
could mention numerous other examples.
41 Hegel discusses the corresponding psychological processes in the chapter
"Theoretical spirit" (HPSS, 55 44.5468). For some of the details of this correspondence,
see H. Ikiiheimo, "On the role of intersubjectivity in Hegel's Encyclopaedic
Phenomenology and Psychology," The Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain, Nos.
49/50,2004. The best existing account of Hegel's epistemology in Philosophy of Spirit
that I know is C. Halbig, Objektives Denken: Erkenntnistheorie und Philosophy of Mind in
Hegels System, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Fromman-Holzboog, 2001.
42 Hegel is a conceptual realist who maintains that reality instantiates conceptual
structures, but this is not to be confused with the claim that all of reality is somehow
'mehtal'. However, in speaking of 'realism', 'antirealism', 'idealism' and so forth, one
needs to be clear on which realms of what there is one is talking about. The social and
institutional world is of course in many ways 'mental' in the sense of mind-dependent,
whereas nature is not (except where it is moulded by human action).
" HPSS, 5424-437.
44 ibid., 5g26-429. This is what the first or the two "oughts" (Sollen) of practical feeling (Gefiihl) in ibid., g 7 2 is about. See also Brandom's contribution to this volume on
"erotic significance".
45 ibid., 5426.
46 Understanding fully the structure of the primitive desiring intentionality requires
taking a look at what Hegel writes about the animal world-relation in Philosophy of
202
Heikki Ikheimo
Nature. On this, see H. Ikaeimo, 'Animal Consciousness in Hegel's Philosophy of

Subjective Spirit', forthcoming in Hegel-Jahrbuch.
47 'Drive' (Trieb) is Hegel's general term for the teleological urge of the human lifeform. He talks of the drive of spirit to cognize objectivity (HTSS, g 1 6 Addition), the
drive of self-consciousness to actualise what it is implicitly (ibid., 425), the drive to
knowledge (ibid., 5443 Add.), the drive to the good and the true (G. W. F. Hegel, The
Encyclopaedia Logic, trans. T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, H. S. Harris, Indianapolis,
Hackett, 1991, 225), and so on.
48 See EPR, 54 on the connection of the "theoretical" and "practical attitude".
49 One of the central senses of Hegel's enigmatic phrase "all consciousness is selfconsciousness" (HPSS, g24) is that self-consciousness in otherness is the essence and
therefore immanent ideal of all intentionality. See also ibid., 416 Add., where Hegel
talks of the "abstract certainty" that spirit has, on the one hand, of "being with itself1'-in primitive practical consciousness--and of the "exactly opposite" certainty of the
"otherness" of the object-in primitive theoretical consciousness. The overcoming of
this contradiction in being with oneselfin otherness-both in cultivated theoretical and
cultivated practical consciousness-is the ideal or telos of intentionality, one which
there is a "drive" to actualise.
One could also simply say 'the life-form of persons', but since Hegel did not
entertain the possibility of other animal species overcoming mere naturality, and also
since it nicely translates the idea of 'humans insofar as they are not merely natural',
I use the expression 'human persons'.
51 G. W. F. Hegel, Ienaer Systernenhviirfe 111, Naturphilosophie und Philosophie des
Geistes, ed. R.-P. Horstmann, Hamburg, Meiner, 1987, pp. 197-198
52 PS, 5177.
53 The 'I' in this formula is often read as standing for a collective subject. This allows
for two alternatives: either understanding the 'I' as a real thinking and willing subject
(which means agreeing with the jokes about Hegel we started with), or in some ontologically less harmful, more metaphorical sense. I have nothing against the latter alternative, except that even it does not sit well with Hegel's systematic concept of the I in
the mature Encyclopedia Phenomenology, which is unambiguously a concept applying
only to singular human persons. In any case, whether the 'we' in question is conceived
of in some metaphorical sense as an 'I' itself or not, it consists of singular flesh and
blood human subjects that are 1's and thous by recognising each other-and this is the
ontologically decisive phenomenon. I am grateful to Carl-Goran Heidegren and
Andrew Chitty for helpful exchanges on this issue. I borrow the idea of talking of I$
and thous from Heidegren.
54 In contrast to principles (1) and (2), this principle (3) only has this one application
or instantiation- in intersubjectiverelationships that is.
rI
1
1i
I
1
1
1
4
I
I
1
i
I
j
Hol~smand Normative Essentialism in Hegel's Social Ontology 203
55 h4ichael Theunissen, JiirgenHabermas and others have argued that this is indicative of a decisive devaluing in Hegel's part of the concept of recognition in his later
work. For critiques of this view, see R. R. Williams, Hegel's Ethics of Recognition,
Berkeley, University of California Press, 1997; and IkZheimo, "On the role of
intersubjectivity".
56 See G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit (1827-8), trans. R. R. Williams,
Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007 [LPS], 60, 66-67; and HPSS, $5 377-384. On
spirit, humanity and concrete freedom, see A. Chitty, "Hegel and Marx," forthcoming
in The Blackwell Companion to Hegel.
57 A natural object can instantiate human will by being worked on, by being made
someone's property, or receiving a function (and thus functional essence) in human

practices, but then it is not a purely natural object anymore.
58 HPSS, 5427, Addition.
59 See H. Frankfurt, "Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person," Journal of
Philosophy, 68,1971, pp. 5-20.
In Mheimo, "On the role of intersubjectivity" I argue that in Philosophy of
Subjective Spirit 'desire' as a practical mode of intentionality corresponds to 'sensuous consciousness~as a theoretical mode of intentionality, for which the object is an
immediate "here and now" without past or future.Tor more on the structure of objectivity dictated by immediate desire-orientation, see Ikiiheimo, 'Consciousness before
mognition', and P. Redding, Hegel's Hermeneutics, Ithaca and London, Cornell

University Press, 1996,105.
Although Sensuous consciousness as the epistemiccomplement of desire is formally

a 'theoretical' mode of intentionality, any more elaborate theoretical grasp of the world
is obstructed by pure desire-orientation. This is what Hegel means by saying that
"theoretical conduct begins with the inhibition of desire" in G.W.F. Hegel, Hegel's
Philosophy of Nature, Volume 1, ed. M. J. Petry, London, George Allen and Unwin
[HPN], p. 198, line 29.
In other words, although the pure wanton is an epistemically extremely good
tracker of what is relevant in its environment for the satisfaction of its limited needs, it
"
is epistemically completely dumbfounded by anything else-assuming that anythmg

else manages to penetrate into its one-track consciousness.
65 Hl'SS, 5429-430.
R. R. Williams' Recognition: Fichte and Hegel on the Other, Albany, State University
of New York Press, 1992 chapter 12, clarifies the confusion, prevalent especially in
twentieth century French philosophy.
65 Mutuality, symmetry and equality are not exactly the same thing, but here it
should be enough just to make a note of this.
204
Heikki Ibheimo
" It is not possible here to chart and scrutinise the features of a symmetric or equal
intersubjective state which would combine both intersubjective instrumentalisation
and intersubjective fear. I invite the reader to think through possibilities not explicitly
considered here. See also Stekeler-Weithofer's contribution to this collection, p. 103.
67 Saying that the significance of the other in what Brandom calls recognition in this
article is "authority" seems like stretching the meaning of the word quite a bit. From
the point of view of the desiring subject it is as significant to see the other desiring
subject to die in agony and thereby provide information (as any objective state of
event may 'provide' information) of what is poison as it is to see it as flourishing and
thereby provide information of what is food. What is at stake in "simple recognition"
is certainly informative usefulness, but it is less than clear what this has to do with
authoritativeness.
68 See M. Tomasello, "Why Don't Apes Point?," in N. J. Enfield & S. C. Levinson,
Roots of Human Sociality, Oxford, Berg, 2006, pp. 508-509.
69 Thus, on the one hand, Brandom's primitive desiring subjects are already more
complex than Hegel's, and, on the other hand, his recognitively constituted subjects
are more primitive than Hegel's.
70 T. Pinkard, German Philosophy 176&1860: The Legacy of Idealism, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 283.
71 See, for instance, G. H. von Wright, "Determinism and the Study of Man," in eds.
J. Manninen & R. Tuomela, Essays on Explanation and Understanding, Dortsecht, Reidel,
1976. Sanctions can take many forms, but since it is agreed that humans cannot live
without other humans, the virtual death-threat of social exclusion is always looming
in the imaginary space of social-pressure accounts. Hence the Hegelian fear of death is
a relevant figure of thought for them.
PS, 5194.
That is, assuming that it is the case that Hegel's view of a good society is decisively anti-Hobbesian. In "Natural Impurities in Spirit? Hegelianism Between Kant
and Hobbes" (forthcoming in Parrhesia) I suggest that distinguishing Hegel clearly
from Hobbes requires being clear about the motivational element of the attitudes of
recognition. This is an issue that in my view contemporary neo-Hegelians have not
focussed on adequately.
74 HPSS, 5436. Emphasis H.I.
75 I do not know any discussion that clearly connects Hegel's statements about the
concept of spirit in the introduction to his mature Philosophy of Spirit with his statements about recognition in the Self-consciousness-chapterin the same text. In lack of
clear awareness of this connection, the image can linger on that recognition is largely
irrelevant for the constitution of spirit in Hegel's late work.
"
76 In A. Chitty,"Hegel and M a d ' recognition of the other appears as merely responsive to the freedom of the other, as if a theoretical or epistemic response to a pre-given
fad. As far as I can see, my reconstruction of recognition as constitutive of concrete
interpersonal freedom fits better with the rest of what Chitty says in his extremely
useful article.
"Knowing" (Wissen) is a term with a very general meaning for Hegel. In
Griesheim's notes to Hegel's lectures on Phenomenology from the summer term 1825
(in HPSS, Volume 3, p. 274) we read: "the state in which an independent object is posited as sublated is called knowing". By "posited as sublated Hegel means simply
'having in view as an intentional object'. Thus, in the broadest sense "knowing" simply means having something in view as an object of one's consciousnes~whether
theoretical or practical.
LPS, 194.
79 "The consciousness of the other is now the basis, the material, the space in which
I realise myself." (HPSS, Volume 3, p. 333.)
For more on the relationship of person-making psychological capacities and
interpersonal person-making significances, see Wteimo, "Recognizing persons."
81 That there are more than one attitude of recognition is originally Axel Honneth's
insight. See A. Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral and Political Grammar of
Social Conflicts, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1995.
" HPSS, 55420-421.
83 See R. Brandom, "Some Pragmatic Themes in Hegel's Idealism: Negotiation and
Administration in Hegel's Account of the Structure and Content of Conceptual
Norms," European Journal of Philosophy, E2, 1999, pp. 164-189. The importance of
Brandom's work in clarifying this idea is by no means diminished by the problems
that his account involves with regard to the motivational issues in recognition. See
also Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer's constructive critique of Brandom, and Italo Testa's
discussion of the difference between Brandom's earlier and more recent models of
pragmatics, in their respective contributions to this volume.
84 See the chapter on habit in HPSS, 5g09-410.
85 This is a parade example of a case where the concept of concrete freedom really
bites. The idea of complete negative or abstractfiedomfrom social norms reduces to the
absurdity of freedom from what one is, namely a person. Real freedom with regard to
social norms has to be grasped in terms of the relationship that persons have to them,
which is not neutral as to the content of those norms.
86 Hegel's shows no interest in the question (much discussed after Wittgenstein)
whether it would be in principle possible to be a norm-oriented, or "rulefollowing" subject independently of others. His interest is in describing human
206
Heikki Ikheimo
persons as we know them-as beings in whose being norm-orientation is a social or

intersubjective matter.
87 There is a robust sense of receptivity in this: we do not attribute the significanceof
an original source of authority to each other willfully. Rather, the attitude that does
this is itself a way of being moved by the other.
On Searle's account (in Searle, Making the Social World, p. 8) the practical attitudes
of "acceptance or recognition" constitutive of institutions go "all the way from enthusiastic endorsement to grudging acknowledgement, even the acknowledgement that
one is simply helpless to do anything about, or reject, the institutions in which one
finds oneself." A less 'liberal' or more strongly social or ethical view would have it
that mere helpless acceptance of power arrangementsdoes not make them institutions
at all. For one such view, see Tuomela, The Philosophy of Sociality, p. 194.In contrast, the
Hegelian route allows one to think of strong ethicality as an immanent ideal of institutions, while simultaneously being non-committal on whether it is a necessary condition of something's being an institution in the first place. See M. Tomasello, Why We
Cooperate, Cambridge, The MJT Press, 2009,p. 38 for the claim that even the earliest
participation of children in norm-governed interaction involves genuine social normativity based on mutual respect and mutual authorship, rather than either simply
on fear or on expectation of personal gain. Without being able to go into detail, in my
view the most important elements of Hegel's conception of 'spirit' or the human lifeform are supported by Tomasello's empirical work in anthropology and primatology.
89 I am not taking any stance here on whether Hegel was fair to Kant. Rather, I am
suggesting that in its one-sided emphasis on norms, authority and so on much of contemporary neo-Hegelianism in fact exemplifies aspects of the kind of legalism Hegel
wanted to overcome.
90 See HPSS,5436; HPSS, Volume 3,333 (line 19: "If we speak of right, ethicality,
love"; line 25:"Benevolence or love [...Iv);LPS, 194 ("in love and friendship").
91 See especially LPS, p. 194. See also Robert R. Williams' discussion of love in
Hegel's Philosophy of Spirit in Williams' introduction to LPS, p. 23-24.
92 HPSS, w34.
93 idem.
94 HPSS, 55451464.
95 HPN, 5259,Remark, p. 233.For more on this, see my article "The Temporality of
Hegel's Concrete Subject," forthcoming in Critical Horizons.
96 HPSS, 55457463.
97 Hegel's spills no ink in discussing this explicitly, but it is a rather obvious implication of his discussion of the conventionality of the relation of the sigmfier and signified, in ibid., 55457459.
98 This is not to say that interpersonal attitudes are all there is to the sociality of
value-structures, but only that the former is the ontological backbone of anything's
having desire-transcendingvalue for persons.
99 G. H. Mead, Mind, Selfand Society, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1962,chapter 37; Talcott Parsons, "Prolegomena to a Theory of Social Institutions," American
Sociological Rm'ew, vol. 55,no. 3,1990,p. 330.
'0 In Ikaheimo, "Is 'recognition' in the sense of intrinsic motivational altruism
necessary for pre-linguistic communicative pointing?" eds. W. Christensen, E. Schier,
J. Sutton, ASCSO9: Proceedings of the Australasian Society for Cognitive Science, Sydney,
Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science, http://www.maccs.mq.edu.au/news/
conferences/2009/ASCS2009/html/ikaheimo.h1)I present considerations for the
claim that the recognitive attitudes of respect and love are part of the explanation
why human infants, but no other animals, are capable of engaging in the prelinguistic communicative pradice of pointing. This supports Stekeler-Weithofer's
claim (in his contribution to this volume) that shared pointing and therefore objectreference requires recognition in a strong ethical sense. If this is true, and if it is
true that without learning shared object-reference in pointing-practices it is also
impossible to learn symbolic communication or language, then all forms of mindedness dependent on language among humans are genetically dependent on love
and/or respect. To resort to evolutionary argumentation (a mode of argumentation
unavailable in Hegel's time), a completely 'Machiavellian' social life-form in which
not only being moved by the well-being of others but also being moved by their
will or 'authority' rests exclusively on prudential considerations seems less likely
to be viable in the long term than one in which at least part of these intersubjective
motivations are intrinsic. This is because the intrinsic motivations of respect and
love bring about a radical unburdening of cognitive resources to be used for collectively useful purposes. If this is so, then it would not be surprising if respect and love
would not be only immanent ideals of our life-form, but also necessary for the existence of its less than ideal instantiations. It maybe that even really bad, in the sense of
extremely loveless and disrespecting, modes of social existence could not prevail
among humans without at least some supporting love and respect somewhere upor downstream.
lo' Hegel's discussion of contract in EPR, 5572-81 is especially ambiguous, if not
confused in this regard: Hegel does not distinguish in it between interpersonal
recognition of the other as having authority on the norms of the relationship on the
one hand, and acknowledgement of the other as bearer of deontic or institutional
powers (rights, duties) entailed by the norms on the other hand. On the distinction
between the interpersonal and the institutional, see Ikaheimo, "Recognizing persons".
208
Heikki Ibheimo
A further source of confusion is that Hegel's talk of 'love' conflates important distinctions. These include the distinction between love as a recognitive attitude on the one
hand, and 'love' as a concrete interpersonal relationship instantiating that attitude on
the other hand, as well as the distinction between the affective element and the cognitive content of the recognitive attitude of love.
'" See Brandom's discussion of "essentially self-conscious creatures" in "The Structure of Desire and Recognition", in this collection.
lrn These thoughts are influenced by Arto Laitinen's discussion of the various senses
of the question "what are we essentially?" in Laitinen, "Constitution and Persons".
'" PS, g38. See Stekeler-Weithofer's article in this collection, p. 98.
Iffi See Brandom's notes on the importance of sacrifice for essentially self-conscious
beings in "The Structure of Desire and Recognition", in this collection, pp. 227-230.
lffi AS the reader may notice, we have already started drifting to a direction that is in
detail not quite Hegel's, by using his own conceptual arsenal. I shall return to this in
the conclusion. See Quante, "Recognition as the Social Grammar of Species Being in
Marx," section 4.2.
lo7 All citations in this paragraph from G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History,
trans. by J. Sibree, Kitchener, Batoche Books, 2001, p. 32.
Io8 See note 77.
Im Hegel, The Philosophy of History, p. 32
"O Would it help to meet a representative of another culture who maintained that
mutual fear and instrumentalisation are functionally and ethically good and that
mutual respect and love are functionally and ethically bad for human co-existence?
Only if one could make sense of what the other means by saying so.
"I It is a further question how representations according to which all is well in a society can mingle with inarticulate (because lacking cultural representations)feelings by
its members that something is wrong (perhaps even horribly so). The power of ideologies is limited by the resistance of what actually works well in human practices and
this is not independent of deep-rooted ethical convictions that are not infinitely malleable. I am suggesting, in the spirit of Hegel's normative essentialism, that the reason
why lack of recognition in the sense of lack of respect and love tends to engender feelings of something's being wrong has to do with common sense about what is functionally and ethically good in human co-existence. Moral feelings engendered by
experiences of lack of recognition are at the centre of Axel Honneth's work on recognition. See, especially,Honneth, The Strugglefor Recognition; and my constructivecritique
of Honneth's approach in H. Ikfieirno, "A Vital Human Need: Recognition as Inclusion in Personhood," European Journal of Political Theory, vol. 8, no. 1,2009,3145.
" 2 This, on my reading, is the core of Hegel's cunning philosophical construal of
John 4: 24: "God is essentially spirit" (HPSS,p. 58). This section of the article has been
r
1
I
1
said in this text.
Holism and Normative Essential~smin Hegel's Social Ontology 209
influenced by my reading of Paul Redding's and Michael Quante's contributions to

this collection.
"3 Raimond Gaita's work (such as R. Gaita, A Common Humanity: Thinking About
Love 8 Truth b Justice, Melbourne, Text, 1999) is one potent source of infection with
such suspicions.
"4 See M. Quante, "Recognition as the Social Grammar of Species Being in Marx."
On the Hegel-Marx-connection,see also Chitty, "Hegel and Marx".
115 On love in the social philosophy of the young Marx, see D. Brudney, "Producing
for Others," in eds. H.-C. Schmidt am Busch & C. Zurn, The Philosophy of Recognition:
Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, Lanham, Lexington Books, 2010, 151-188. On
the influences of the young Marx's understanding of Hegel, such as Feuerbach., see
Quante, "Recognition as the Social Grammar of Species Being" and Chitty, "Hegel
and Marx".
116 For more on this, see M. Quante, "On the Limits of Construction and Individualism in Social Ontology," in eds. E. Lagerspetz, H. Wiheimo & J. Kotkavirta,
On The Nature of Social and Institutional Reality, Jyvaskyla, SoPhi, 2001.
"7 My thanks are due to Paul Formosa, Arto Laitinen, Ming-Chen Lo, Michael
Monahan, Douglas Robinson and Titus Stahl for helpful comments to an earlier version of this text. This may be the right place also to acknowledge my debt to Michael
Quante and Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer, whose influence on my thought goes much
deeper than testified by the footnotes. I am of course alone responsible for everything

Holism and Normative Essentialism in Heg

Diunggah oleh

Informasi Dokumen

Hak Cipta

Format Tersedia

Bagikan dokumen Ini

Bagikan atau Tanam Dokumen

Opsi Berbagi

Apakah menurut Anda dokumen ini bermanfaat?

Apakah konten ini tidak pantas?

Hak Cipta:

Format Tersedia

Holism and Normative Essentialism in Heg

Diunggah oleh

Hak Cipta:

Format Tersedia

144

In the evaluative ("Greek") sense of the term.

" As I have done in my book Konkrete Ethik.

"If you say that collective intentionality

Hegel is rarely mentioned in contemporary

Holtsrn and Normative Essentlalisrn In Hegel's Soclal Ontology 147

What is the object of social ontology? A relatively uncontroversial answer to

I. A Hegelian solution to a contemporary problem in social

This requires making a short excursion to the question whether normative

This will be done by first (IV)thematising three basic principles of Hegel's

Holism and Normative Essentialism in Hegel's Social Ontology 149

To seriously thematise the very foundations of the social and institutional

II. Some complexities of reading Hegel, and prospects they open

Holism and Normative Essentialism in Hegel's Social Ontology 15 1

Different levels of conceptualisation and the relation between them

First, there is an inbuilt 'necessary contingency' involved in the interplay of

It is a consequence of the fact that structures of reality, as Hegel conceives of

Holism and Normative Essentialism in Hegel's Social Ontology 153

But there is a further complication. Namely, what is at issue is not merely to

phenomena, but immanent to each phenomenon as their essence or essential

Holism and Normative Essentialism in Hegel's Social Ontologj 155

(whatever one thinks are) the questionable details of Philosophy of Objective

But what about the philosophical credibility of conceiving essences or essential

Ill. Hegel's normative essentialism--sound common sense about

Whereas the attempt at systematically conceiving the constitution of human

So what is essentialism? Let us agree that on the most liberal formulation

In social ontology, essentialism is, as such, a perfectly normal position to take.

Holism and Normative Essentialism in Hegel's Social Ontology 157

Think of, say, ~hairs.2~

When something exemplifies this feature or significance to a very high degree,

Holism and Normative Essentialism in Hegel's Social Ontology 159

essentialist on the human life-form is at least not as obviously damning of

d) they have an immanent tendency towards actuali~ation.~

IV. Basic principles of Hegel's social ontology

developed in the logic is somehow at play in Hegel's structural descriptions of

Holism and Normative Essentialism in Hegel's Social Ontology 16 1

The principle of absolute negation applies in Hegel's view to many things

The principles can be called

(3) the principle of interpersonal recognition.

(2) the principle of self-consciousness,or of consciousness of oneselfin otherness

(1) the principle of absolute negation, or of being with oneselfin otherness,

Holism and Normative Essentialism in Hegel's Social Ontology 163

immanent to theoretical intentionalityis, unsurprisingly,to cognise objectivity

As to the practical dimension of intentionality," practical consciousness is a

Whereas the object of theoretical consciousness is at its most primitive level

Holism and Normative Essentialism in Hegel's Social Ontology 165

or specificity here is the intentional relationship with objects of a very special

V. Hegelian recognition-from what it does to what i t is

to the subject, the object of practical consciousness is at its most primitive

In the Introduction to his mature Philosophy of Spirit Hegel makes it clear

In other words, one's practical intentionality can be reconciled with

In order to have a clear focus on what exactly interpersonal recognition is on

Holism and Normative Essentialism in Hegel's Social Ontology 167

The essential factorin Hegel's account is that subjects overcomethe immediacy

VI. Recognition as mediation of intentionalities

Holism and Normative Essentialism in Hegel's Social Ontology 169

thinking about recognition actually appear in the literature. Since we are

As to the instrumentalist view, instead of charting all the different variations

Following Brandom's story further, the subsequent stages of recognition

Holism and Normative Essentialism in Hegel's Social Ontology 173

VII. Recognition as personifying mediation

What is recognition then if it is to have all of the characteristics and functions

Universal self-consciousness is the afinnative knowing of oneself in another

Holism and Normative Essentialism in Hegel's Social Ontology 175